I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip.

3 years, 2 months, 11 days...thats a pretty secure system

The reaction from the hacker community is first that of disbelief, as there have been many such claims in the past that turned out to be scams. But Geohot’s reputation as an iPhone hacker made the news very believable although some remain skeptical until hard proof comes out of a successful hack.

The hacker remains cautious not to reveal too much info to Sony although he did state that the theory is unpatchable. If you own a PS3, I suggest not updating it any further in case the hack won’t work with newer firmware. A few other hackers close to Geohot have confirmed his hack on the website leading even more credence to the news.

Geohot’s objective of hacking the PS3 is to unsigned code which makes it possible for the homebrew community to have full access to Sony’s hardware. A side-effect to this would be that it would now be possible to run pirated games on the PS3, provided you have the money to invest in a Blu-ray burner and on the Blu-ray discs, both of which are prohibitively priced at the moment.

Some have expressed hope in having the hack allow running ISO games directly from the PS3’s hard drive, eliminating the need to purchase any expensive equipment. For all intents and purposes, the hack that Geohot will release will not feature any of these illegal copy-protection circumventions, although enterprising Chinese hackers will surely come in to fill this massive void.

Finally, the hack was accomplished without using any modchips. However Geohot did not mention whether the complicated setup he has on his PS3 is necessary to execute the hack, or is merely there to help him find the vulnerability that allowed for the hack to happen.

But Bit Torrent will be undergoing a dramatic shift soon and here are some new technologies that users may find useful to learn up on.

As it is, Torrents still function by downloading a piece of ‘xxx.torrent’ file from popular file sharing websites such as Pirate Bay, Mininova, Eztv, and so on. With information contained within the files, the torrent client (uTorrent, Azureus, etc) then calculates a ‘torrent hash’ with a fingerprint of the files which is to be downloaded. The large files are often broken down into smaller chunks (a typical 30-minute series can have thousands of fragments), there are thousands of hashes to be calculated. After obtaining the hashes, the client then connects to ‘peers’ to start downloading the file fragments. After downloading, a hash is generated from the fragment and compared to the precomputed one earlier. If they are identical, it means the fragment is downloaded correctly with no errors. Sometimes, due to inefficiencies, the fragment may have an incorrect hash and is rejected. Companies can also poison a torrent swam by injecting false information but this tactic is negated with proper hash checking.

Anyway, it all comes down to this xxx.torrent file, which you have to get from ’somewhere’ and many authorities have started to crack down on popular sharing sites which host these files. The Pirate Bay is a famous example, having been forced out of Sweden (where their servers are located) due to pressure from copyright holders. With no access to torrent files, Bit Torrent is dead.

Thankfully, three new technologies have surfaced to aid and increase Bit Torrent and they are DHT, PEX and Magnet links. A fourth, so far only present in uTorrent, has also provides a new method to reduce traffic congestion caused by Bit Torrent activities.

Distributed Hash Table

DHT, also know as Distributed Hash Table, is simply another way to foster communication between peers and to discover new peers as they enter a swarm. When activated, your client will connect to a ‘bootstrap’ address such as router.utorrent.com and from there receive a list of peers also with DHT enabled. From there, your client builds up a list of peers and uses them to exchange information related to peers and to receive addresses of new peers when they join the DHT swarm. It is very similar to technologies used in Limewire and WinMX (old file sharing programs) that have a central node, except with DHT, there is no central node, just a swarm of interconnected peers.

Peer Exchange

PEX, or Peer Exchange, is another method of peer discovery whereby when you manage to connect to a peer, you can get a list of peers that person is connected to and repeat the process. It needs to kick start but once it gets going, it is very efficient at getting you new peers to connect to.

Magnet

Magnet is a new way of handling torrent files, also known as torrentless trackers. Instead of downloading a file and computing the hash, the website owner precomputes the hash for you and makes the information available in the Magnet link, which you click. When a torrent client detects the Magnet link, it will automatically launch and connect to peers immediately to download the first torrent file. It is worthy to note that torrent files are still important and hold a lot of necessary information needed to start the process of downloading. Therefore it is so far impossible to eliminate torrent files, but Magnet makes the process a lot more automated and is necessary as anti-P2P laws are moving towards the direction of banning torrent files from being hosted all together.

uTorrent

Fourth and last, uTorrent have built into their clients an automatic decongestion mechanism. When it senses that a network is becoming saturated with too much file sharing activity, it will scale back and allow more important duties such as website and video streaming to take precedence. This will be important as P2P activity start to saturate the connections of Internet service providers which use this as excuse to cut off connections of heavy users or invoke fair-use clauses. It will also improve your home network Internet surfing quality, especially when many people are doing P2P activities on the same network.

No doubt, the Bit Torrent community continue to evolve their methods to fight back against copyright holders. It is also important to note that with modern clients such as uTorrent, PEX and DHT comes automatically activated and you don’t need to do anything to enjoy its benefits. Magnet will be come more common and replace torrent files as time goes on, so no action is necessary on your part as well.

The rules of the game are that one must seek out a colored ticket (there are three colors – red, blue and green) hidden on the Yahoo! Youreka! website; register online and receive a confirmation e-mail that can be exchanged for a Tag to redeem a prize.

You may choose to claim your prize immediately or if you are lucky, exchange your eDM for a purple tag that will give you the chance to take part in the YOUREKA! Finale Event organized by Yahoo! Malaysia, at Capsquare, Kuala Lumpur, on November 25. The best prizes to be won at this stage are such as a customized one-of-a-kind iPOD Touch and Macbook Air!

Last weekend, the first YOUREKA! pit-stop was held at the Adidas flagship store in The Gardens, Midvalley where red tag holders received 10% off Adidas products and free Adidas premiums.

For those of you who are dying to participate, this is how you enter:
Log on to and start looking for YOUREKA! Tickets. Yahoo! users can start hunting right away, while new users need to register.

*Take note that only one colored Tag can be redeemed with a confirmation eDM colored Ticket for each redemption period. Redemption items are non-exchangeable and strictly while stocks last.

First up are two very useful scripts for Greasemonkey that are called FB Purity and Facebook Fixer. FB Purity takes aim at annoying quizzes and blasts them out of Facebook alltogether. Well, technically they are just hidden from you using clever manipulation of CSS scripts, but at least you will enjoy a cleaner looking and less obnoxious home page. Next is Facebook Fixer, which does a whole lot of behind-the-scenes changes so that the new Facebook resembles the older style. More importantly, it adds a really useful feature whereby when you mouse over any images, it will automatically pop up the full resolution picture at the side. Very useful when browsing galleries.

A word of warning though, these scripts need the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, and may cause instabilities if and when Facebook updates their website, which may happen often. So far I only had problems once, and the fix is simply to disable all scripts until an update comes along for it. These two have helped me the most in cleaning up and making Facebook more user friendly and they are thus highly recommended.

Next up is a Firefox extension called Archive Facebook, which does exactly that. After installing, navigate over to Facebook and a link should show, allowing you to backup all your pictures, messages, activity stream, etc. Everything related to your account will have a copy recreated on your hard drive, which is very useful for downloading all your profile pictures.

Finally, TweetDeck is the app of choice when it comes to integrating Facebook, Twitter and MySpace into a single application. The tool is currently the second most popular Twitter application (behind Twitter’s own website) and offers features such as sending and replying tweets, status updates to Facebook and creating groups to monitor selected conversations, as well as previewing thumbnails and un-shortening shorturls so that you can see which websites are going to. It’s wrapped up in a shiny Adobe AIR interface and performs well. I have already replaced Digsby with TweetDeck on my computer.

With these tools, Facebook and Twitter will hopefully work even better for you. Any other tools you can share which improves your experience on these two web services?

Once they successfully establish a connection to you and start downloading data, its pretty much an open and shut case when it goes to court in terms of evidence needed. They simply need to track your IP address, send a subpoena to the company providing you your Internet access to cough up your personal information. To combat this problem, a program called PeerGuardian2 (PG2) came along and promises to alleviate some of your headaches.

PG2 works by keeping a list of ‘blacklisted’ IP addresses that are known to belong to these organizations. If your computer attempts to make a connection to these blacklisted IPs, it will prevent the computer from actually completing the connection and thus save you a potentially hefty fine.

PG2 hasn’t been updated in awhile, so PeerBlock came along. It is based on the same source code of PG2, but with a few bugfixes to correct existing problems in PG2. The software is very easy to download and set up so give it a shot if you are looking to try and reduce your radar fingerprint on the copyright radar.

Another similar program is called Protowall. It works using the same concept as PeerBlock/PG2 but has an even more comprehensive lists that is maintained around the clock by armies of dedicated users. Their block lists includes AntiP2P organizations, Spyware, AD Trackers, Spam, and so on. These will ensure that your computer will never be allowed to establish a connection to blocked IP addresses to communicate with them.

Finally, a more complicated method involves running your BitTorrent trackers through the Tor network, although for most users this is quite a challenging task, with in-depth guides written about it such as the one available here. Anyway, most of the world has moved on to using file upload websites such as Rapidshare, Megaupload and so on. This next generation file-sharing service seems to be providing a viable solution to the problem of ‘throttled’ P2P traffic by internet providers and the fear of being caught using P2P software. Sites like Rapidshare are no different than an ordinary website and downloads are done through HTTP, so it is indistinguishable from legitimate surfing traffic. It remains to be seen whether P2P is able to offer this kind of protection soon before file sharing sites such as Rapidshare figure out a way to handle the problem of removing illegal content on their servers.

For many years now, I have been a loyal Google fan and scoff at anybody who uses other search engines, especially Yahoo’s. But research have shown that just by attaching a logo or trademark to search results, you can be biased towards the brand that you are used to. That’s the purpose of the Search Engine Blind Test website linked above.

The site is pretty simple, just type in any search query and it shows you results in three columns side by side. Simply choose the one you think shows you the best results and the site will reveal who them belong to. In my limited testing, I found that I tend to average pretty evenly between all three websites. Then again, it may be because my queries are pretty general and the results show more or less the same things, albeit ordered differently.

The website also supports searching for images, which is a plus for me because I do a lot of stuff that requires looking up images constantly and now I am able to search across all three sites in one page.

Understand though that this website will strip out all personalization and localization that companies like Google and Microsoft often incorporate into their search results. It is purely a test of the search algorithms with some parts of it disabled. Some argue that the personalization (where past searches are used to compute future search results) means the test is rather crippled. However, until someone comes up with a better idea, you can head on over to the website and let us know which search engines you end up choosing the most.

The following are the top 10 search terms that the website have gotten so far:

Chrome Web Browser

Chrome was a successful web browser that is written from scratch to have a focus on low memory footprints, fast operation and requiring minimum hardware requirements.

The Javascript handling of the browser is also top notch and allows some pretty interesting experiments such as the Chrome Experiments website, which has a host of interesting and innovative web-based technology showcases that can be run from any browser, but the catch being that unless you have a fairly powerful computer, only Google Chrome will be able to handle the taxing demands of the website as it is optimized to run the complex Javascript codes used in the website.

Chrome introduced a new concept of isolating tabs from each other such that one tab gone awry won’t cause the whole browser to crash. It also implements security improvements that reduces the likelihood of a malicious website being able to hack into our system. As a whole, the browser managed to be fast and safe, almost idiot-proof to use.

Chrome Operating System

The underlying features and optimizations of Chrome made it a candidate to grow to a full blown operating system and as such, Google will be producing the Chrome OS based on these tenets of speed and security that Chrome embodies. The system is reported to run on all x86 hardware (meaning all computers will be able to run it) and also on the ARM processors, which is often used in small devices due to the processor’s efficient use of energy. The low performance of ARM processors (in comparison with more mature but energy consuming desktop processors) means that the Chrome OS will likely be the solution to having a speedy system running on very low power processors.

Google hopes that their OS will be able to start up in seconds and have a reduced user interface (ala Chrome the browser) so that the user can quickly get down to the business of actually using their computer to do work rather that fiddling around with it. Google also adds that in the new environment of cloud computing, they hope to be able to focus more on security and providing a virus-free environment. It certainly sounds like lofty goals, and seems to intersect with their own Android OS, which also targets largely the same crowd.

The Chrome OS will be targeted towards netbooks up to full desktops, while Android will continue to be disseminated on mobile and cellular gadgets and small nettops. Google admits there will be some overlap between the two, but they “believe that choice will drive innovation”.

The Chrome OS is expected to ship circa 2010.

A repository of Bookmarklets

However, getting your hands on useful bookmarklets have proven to be a less than friendly experience. Google searches brings up only a handful of relevant results and the majority of them are scattered all over the web. This is where Bookmarklet Directory comes into place. As more and more people come to understand and appreciate the simplicity of bookmarklets, there will be a growing number of user-generated bookmarklets and Bookmarklet Directory aims to collect and rate each submitted bookmarklet in a central repository, much like what Userscripts.org has done for Greasemonkey scripts.

There are a huge number of bookmarklets currently on the site, running on a diverse range of platforms including Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even the iPhone version of Safari. The site categorizes into highest rated, newest and also most popular. You can also browse by tags. However, missing is the option to browse by function, which makes it a tad bit difficult if you are looking for a specific way of achieving something via bookmarklet. The search function attempts to bridge this though.

Being so Web 2.0, Bookmarklet Directory also has a Twitter feed which you can follow @bookmarklets.

Having discussed heavily about various URL shortener services lately, it’s impressive that StumbleUpon has finally up its game in competing with DiggBar. Also, some believe that the new SU.PR will raise a strong competition against the all time favourite – Bit.ly, the famous URL shortener that offers click-stats for its users.

Just How Super It Is About SU.PR?

1. It offers real time click stats for users, as well as bookmarklet for convenient URL conversion.
2. Traffic builder: The use of Su.pr equalizes link submission to StumbleUpon, since it is linking directly to the main site. This offers the opportunity to get noticed and voted by the StumbleUpon community that closing up to 8 million users.
3. One-Click to send Su.pr to famous social media sites like Twitter & Facebook.
4. “Suggested Posting Time” for users to identify best timing to post their links for maximum traffic; also available in scheduling for future posting.
5. Su.pr provides the option for users to customize their URLs with own domain name. For example: kongtechnology.com/abc
6. Keeping track with retweet stats for your posted links.

Now some are skeptic about the 301 redirect issue for Su.pr since its service consisting framing, a similar layout to Diggbar or Ow.ly. However, it is said that once the su.pr is officially launched, site owners can then host the toolbar on their own site by inserting a Javascript within. Just how well it will clear the doubts of many, I guess we could only wait and see.

Since Su.pr is still in private Beta, StumbleUpon will be granting a few access rights to people each week through invitation code. So remember to follow StumbleUpon on Twitter for the latest scoops.

What’s your thought about the new Su.pr?

Why it’s Important to Claim Vanity URL for Your Username in Facebook?

Some of you may not even bothered to sacrifice your plans on THE DAY for a little silly trick like this. However, there’s something you need to know:

• Vanity URL is your digital identity.  If you plan for business or personal branding exposures via social media sites, there’s no reason why you should risk the chance of getting your very own vanity URL with Facebook – the world’s largest social networking site.
• An easier way to find your personal profile by search engine. Having it memorable and effortless for others to find you is the main idea.

Remember the domain-grabbing in earlier days? Pretty much the same type of frenzy. Only the webmasters are now fighting over it in Facebook.

The vanity URL grabbing spree will be conducted in first-come, first-served basis. Beneficial to users who owned their profiles before the feature was announced on 9^th June 2009. So if you’re a newbie in Facebook, well better luck on 28^th June then. Finger crossed that hopefully nobody will pick up the exact same branding name as yours. Also, don’t misspell your name, as it is not editable. And NO, You can’t try to sell Pepsi or whatever big names you grabbed either, it’s not transferable, and they could report you for infringement. So be honest and play fair, register your (brand) name only.

So all set for the game? Enjoy the Count Down… right now it says “0 days 11 hours 9 minutes 18 seconds”!