1. PS3 Jailbreak 4.25
Much of the blame online was aimed towards Geohot himself.
With very little fan fare just one video clip appeared on you tube showing a brand new PS3
Jailbreak dongle. News of this spread like wildfire. News sites called fake on the video at first.
but as more details were released it became clear that this was indeed the real deal. Even at
over 100 dollars all stores received many pre orders. This meant it would be weeks until
some people who had paid could get their dongles The key problem was fixed with firmware
3.56 released quickly by Sony This blocked unknown USB devices from working. This simple
move stopped the dongle dead in its tracks. But it did mean however all games up to that
point could now be backed up. It meant the end of playing them on PSN though. With
christmas on the way the new rush of game releases would need updated firmware to play,
Gran Turismo 5 was the first big release not to work. It required firmware 3.50 to run and this
means no dongles could work.
It wasn’t until nearly Christmas that a way was found to play it on CFW. Of course it was
actually just after that same Christmas that failoverflow cracked the keys New years eve and
the next day saw the scene light up with the first news of the public keys. The first true PS3
“hello world” released by Geohot on 1st January Then in a move that angered sony he
released his jailbreak. This one small pup file patched out the key checks enabling both
homebew and PSN access. A great method to run backups was discovered using this
jailbreak. Still the nicest looking now! A spate of CFW releases saw many bricks but most
settled on the Keamw or Rebug CFW.
This is the golden age with full PSN access for CFW users. However of course this brings the
cheats in and cheating got especially bad on MW2 and blackops. Infinity Ward banned a
large number of players from their servers for cheating. The PSN account server was hacked
around this time by a mystery hacker. Credit card details were stolen from a possible 50
million users. PSN was quickly close down when reports broke of the hack. PS3 users were
without PSN for nearly 60 days. A new pass key sign on process now prevented CFW users
from accessing PSN. For the average user accessing the network was too difficult. The next
releases of games need the new updated firmware.
A split occurs in the scene between the homebrew and 'backups' crew which divides the
scene until a new dongle was released by true blue. Special DRM in the dongle meant you
had to run specific versions of the game. Eboots that were being released by paradox. Warez
group Duplex were the first to release a whole load of PSN games which were previously
encrypted wih newer keys. Many people began to suspect TrueBLue had access to higher
keys than the 3.55 ones everyone else had, something sort of confirmed a bit later as the
3.60 keys themselves were leaked. The 3.60 keys didnt however lead to a new firmware as
by now the OFW was up to 4.11.