Underball

Yes, there are different types of hackers. And just like with all kinds of people, the ratio of benevolent to vindictive is about on par with anything else. the vast majority just like to learn how it all works. It's a knowledge quest, with no ill or criminal intentions. It's about learning, figuring it all out. Reverse engineering. What they do is akin to stealing a grape from the produce section of a supermarket. Whereas the hackers who do so with the intent to steal or other damaging criminal activity - are the extreme minority. But like any other kind of moral prejudice, the mostly ignorant populace only sees the bad (or worse - what they see or read in the news, which is slanted and woefully uninformed), and paints the entire lot of them with the same brush. Not unlike racism, sexism, or class warfare. Hackers (Geohot) jailbroke the iPhone. The US Justice Department agreed with them.

And after all this grousing and gnashing of teeth and Internet tough talk from behind the bravery of an anonymous keyboard directed towards the "evil hackers" who stole PSN customer info - a giant LOL and ROFL was emitted by said hackers now that it appears the PSN was actually "hacked" internally by disgruntled former employees who were laid off a few days before PSN went down. Not hackers. Not tinkerers. Not game pirates. Not custom firmware users. Sony staff.

Love it. Great 2nd blu-ray player, great games, don't really give a shit about PSN, and never bought anything there anyway.Sucks that people's credit info might have been compromised, but that's really a likely possibility with any online service that allows you to save credit card info. I never save CC info wiht online vendors/in my browser cache. Now that I'm running custom firmware and working on coding for it, it has replaced my aging PS2/old Windows XP Athlon box as my primary means of media usage.

I would guess actually very few, but that won't stop people from citing anecdotal stories of friends doing this as if they represent a majority.

People paid $600 for the PS3 because of OtherOs. Then Sony took it away without telling them, and decimated everything they had installed in it with one firmware update. Now everybody knows how it feels to have something you paid good money for get taken away by Sony's stupidity. Your PSN online games will be back working in a few days. OtherOS and all the data people lost when it was removed isn't coming back. ever. To be fair, Sony didn't really remove OtherOS without telling anybody. There was buzz about it in the days (maybe weeks) leading up to it, and the firmware update presented to you a warning explaining to you that by installing the update, you would be losing OtherOS, and it gave you an option to cancel installation. But Sony didn't give you an option to still be able to play the $60 games released from that point on on your $600 system, WITHOUT installing said update and agreeing to remove OtherOs. I understand why Sony no longer wanted to support it. But forcing people to remove it, or essentially agree to never be able to use anything new on their system is bullshit. It's called forced negotiation. They hedged their bet that most people wouldn't bother to read it or wouldn't care.

Probably around 96% of hackers, which is why most folks don't give a shit about them or their "tinkering". Inventing the next PC, they aren't. Yes, let's just throw arbitrary percentages out there. That'll make your factless opinion seem more legit. You know who definitely isn't inventing the next PC? Dudes who cry about losing their PSN trophies from Modern Warfare, from the comfort of the couch in their Mom's basement, at 42 years old.

People paid $600 for the PS3 because of OtherOs. Then Sony took it away without telling them, and decimated everything they had installed in it with one firmware update. Now everybody knows how it feels to have something you paid good money for get taken away by Sony's stupidity. Your PSN online games will be back working in a few days. OtherOS and all the data people lost when it was removed isn't coming back. ever.

Careful, folks are still waiting for a refund from the "Help Hotz fight Sony" (a fight that never happened) legal fund. I'm sure the cash was put to good use. Rapping lesson is my guess. Why they would still be waiting when it's been donated to the EFF as originally intended is beyond me. While they can be disappointed over the settlement instead of getting the legal battle they hoped for, they knew they wouldn't be seeing the money again as they were told up front any "excesses" would be donated. Because 99% of the people here complaining about this, especially good ol' Moycon here, don't know the first thing about how any of this went down, beyond what they read in dummy IGN headlines, and on boards like this that are so far removed from the actual story, that it's been changed 40 times before it gets here. They don't know of what they speak. Yet they yammer on like goats in a field, bleating at nothing to hear themselves bleat.

don't believe everythign you read on stupid gaming blogs. He didn't run off anywhere. Someone took a photo from his facebook account of him wearing a Boca Juniors futbol jersey, while standing on the Roof of a FRIENDS DORM AT MIT in Cambridge MA. They used it as "proof" that he ran off to Argentina. The photo was taken months ago. He doid go on a vacation while the case was on hiatus, but his vacation wasn't even to Argentina, and it was planned Months in advance of any suit being brought against him. This wasn't a victory for Sony. They won nothing. They had no leg to stand on, and were going to get annihilated in court just like Apple did. They backed down, and settled with him, basically saying "you dont' have to pay us anything for showing the world how to hack our system, as long as you Pretty Please With Sugar on Top Promise not to hack anymore of our products". Sony got no monetary gain. Geohot lost nothing. And that blog is so factually WRONG, it's not even funny. The case was settled, a WEEK BEFORE anonymous DDOSed the PSN.

The whole thing is an unfortunate clusterfuck of stupidity on Sony's part. But there are a few important details here that a number of you are mashing together that are unrelated other than by mere coincidence. When Sony added support for OtherOs, they gave the tinkerers exactly what they wanted, thus no need to hack the system or really even study GameOs to write homebrew. Win-win, right? Sort of. Then it dawned on Sony that this feature might encourage a good chunk of people (like say, the USAF) to buy the PS3 hardware for OtherOs capability, with no intention of ever buying any game software. And that's where it all went sideways. Sony saw a potential dip in revenue, and decided that just arbitrarily taking OtherOs would be better for their bottom line. Heh. Oops. FAIL. Not too smart, deciding to royally piss off the folks with the greatest amount of collective coding and hacking knowledge using your system. So the real hackers made it their goal to take back what was rightfully theirs. But along the way, the very knowledgeable among them also discovered just how flawed and easily exploited the PS3 really was. And they shared that info with the world, hoping it would lead to a whole new crop of homebrew goodness. And it did. But it came at a cost. Sony started hanging up strawmen (geohot) and suing it's users for trying to simply reclaim what they paid for that was taken from them. They made headlines and tons of bad PR, and subsequently a mockery of themselves in the process. So the hackers decided to show the general PS3 userbase what inconvenience means to them, by having OtherOs taken away - in the form of taking down the precious PSN for a few days. But sadly, a couple of bad apples used this as an opportunity to do unscrupulous things and really start breaking laws and causing damage. And that's really the difference. The scumbags who took personal info from the PSN servers ARE NOT the people fighting for their OtherOs rights. For those of you who say it's all just about piracy and freebies - to a small extent for some people you're right. There is defintely a growing underground market for piracy. On EVERY platform. But that wouldn't be anything like having an iPod or iPhone with several gigabytes of non-purchased music on them, would it? Enough with the high horse attitudes, you hypocrites. If you're going to start trumpeting from the Pulpit, lumping everyone who is in the hacking and homebrew scene in this together as all thieves and pirates, you really need to include yourselves here too. I mean Jesus Christ on a Cracker! - people, we're all here posting on a gaming site that hosts THOUSANDS of *technically* illegal ROMS that 90% of us have no intellectual use or copyrights to use or distribute.

It's not really about emulators. It's about proper ownership rights of a $400 gaming system.

do you really need the best supercomputer to run stella or nestopia. horrible excuse. my Window ME, pentium 2 laptop without a standalone video processor could run those programs at 60 fps. You can play COD: black ops online for free from a computer too. In fact, most games on the ps3 have PC ports with online gaming. You don't really need a PS3 at all. You use it for what you want. We'll use it how we want. I don't tell you how to use yours, you do the same, cool?

the hackers who wanted to be able to run homebrew, and the kind of people who steal credit card information are entirely different. Lumping them in together doesn't make sense. And yeah - boo hoo if you can't play online games for FREE for a few days. If you were paying for the service, fine - you have a right to bitch. But you're not. It's a bonus. Online gamers can't rack up trophies for a few days is much less invasive than Sony yanking OtherOS without any warning and decimating people's LEGITIMATE PS3 linux installs.

I never claimed it would. It wasn't for the paddles. The mod I did was on the console that ALREADY worked with paddles.

and then there's this:

HA! I found this as well: http://www.qj.net/ps3/news/rumor-psn-outage-due-to-rebug-custom-firmware.html Of course this isn't confirmed. I havent heard of Rebug but then again CFW's do start popping up once a console is unlocked. The PSP is a good example. Everything you would want or need to know about PS3 CFW and the like is here: psx-scene.com

He really had nothing to do with any this. He was Sony's strawman. His jailbreak didn't even allow piracy or backup managers to run, and it wasn't even the first PS3 Jailbreak. He was the proverbial scapegoat. That's why Sony settled.

Yes it is true. Getting on the Dev PSN was simple. Not much different than changing a hosts file on. PC to reroute DNS inquiries.

Okie dokie, let's take a stroll down memory lane and see what we can find. I'm going to limit it to this thread for time's sake. Also bear in mind, I, like most others on this site, am a collector as well as a gamer. Lot's of "insanely insulting crap" to someone that spends a great deal of time and effort exploring all aspects of classic gaming, wouldn't you say? Now this, I will admit I stepped over a line and for that, I apologize. I don't know your means, nor do I even know you personally. My assumptions are based on 2 things; the way you present yourself here in this thread and others and past experiences with others that post in the same way. However, it's odd that you are so willing to make blanket statements that could (and have) offended others here and when you are presented with something that is the same type of blanket statement, you get upset about it. Like has been mentioned before, I think this could be a very interesting topic and I would imagine that if you could lose the fanboyism, you have a lot of experience to bring to the table and could possibly sway people to your side, or at least inform them where they are incorrect. Sadly, you seem more interested in saying why collectors are doing the wrong things. So, I'm out as well. Enjoy your trip through classic gaming, I hope it serves you well. Blanket statements are exactly that. Blanket. They may or may not pertain to you. It's up to you to decide whether they do or not. You addressed me DIRECTLY. I have no idea whether my comments about fanatical collectors pertains to you or not. Nor am I suggesting that it does directly. But even if it did pertain to you, all I was suggesting is that you're seeing some self-assigned value that others might not, and it might be a bit of rose-tinted nostalgia, mixed with personal affectation for something that isn't evident to all. That you're seeing something not everyone agrees with. You not so subtly called me poor, with a small house, and no "connections" in the classic gaming scene because I told you I like emulation. And it's not just you. It's a pattern among some of the collectors here. The "Have's" vs. "Have-not's". Same old, same old, elitist old-boy club mentality. This kind of reaction is de riguer around here, more often than not. If I insulted you, I apologize. You kind of set yourself up as my straw man.

Some emulators are like Blu-Ray with a DTS HD-MA receiver and a 65" screen ,with Cambridge Soundworks Newton series speakers. (which for my money, is better than going to the theater for $12 a ticket and having to listen to some joker texting and talking on his cell.) Some are like a wet fart in church.

And reading the most negative implications possible into someone's analogy isn't going to do it, either. Apparently, my use of the term "couch potato" in that context (obviously referring to a fictitious person, not to anyone here) is the only thing you got out of my post, and the wider point I was trying to make was totally lost on you. That suggests to me that you're not really interested in a substantive discussion, but merely in being combative and using this topic as an excuse to lash out at people you don't like. I think I'll bow out of this conversation now. It's an interesting subject, but I'd rather discuss it with a grownup who really wants to intelligently explore it. I got your point. you make a good point. You could have made the same point without the offhanded insults though.

Seriously though. This is some insanely insulting crap. But because I believe that emulation can be nearly as accurate and enjoyable as the real thing, I'm supposed to just sit here and politely not respond, as I'm being told that the only reason I don't have a house full of classic gaming hardware is because I'm poor, with a small house, and don't know the right people. Wow.

I may be wrong and you may have the means (which btw, means more than just having money... time, space, patience, contacts, etc all come into play as part of the means to have something. Money is the easy part.). I've seen it played out by a number of fanboys that usually their incessant need to defend the way they approach this hobby stems from something. Usually, it's that they have made a choice, typically not the choice they want to make, and they feel they need others to validate it so they play the devils advocate any chance they get just to make themselves feel better. Simple human nature really, but not a good way to be. So to boil this down, for YOU, having the real hardware and software is not something you want to do. However, there are many aspects of and ways to enjoy "classic gaming" outside of what your limited definition of it is. Some folks like to buy up every dirt cheap game they can, throw them in a box or on a shelf, and say they have a collection. Some folks like to make contacts with industry people and buy up unreleased or pre-release versions of games. Some people like to look for every game made for a console, in a console generation, by a particular manufacturer, or even in a single genre over multiple consoles. Some people have a couple of PS1 games thay play on their PS3 from time to time. Some people only buy domestic games and others only buy imports. Some people play every game they buy and some people play just a few, or even none. Some people have hundreds of arcade games in full cabinets. Some people have hundreds of arcade pcbs that they play on a supergun or in a single cabinet. Some people download dvds full of roms and play emulators. Some people even cross all the lines and dabble in a little bit of everything. All of these people are classic gamers because of one simple, common, thing. They enjoy classic games in a capacity that meets their desires. As long as each person makes their own decision for themselves, none of them are wrong. But your insistence that anybody that isn't using emulation is wasting their time/money/space does get old. Maybe people wouldn't be jumping on you quite as hard if you would just realize that there are different opinions and though your opinion works great for you, it is not the popular opinion in this environment. There are times when you have to realize that you are just digging your own hole deeper. If you want to discuss emulation in a friendly environment, there are plenty of other forums on the net that specialize in just that. I'm sure they will provide you all the support and information you could ever need. Personally, I enjoy the hunt for games/hardware and meeting other collectors in the process. I enjoy the act of catalogging what I have and researching what I've found. I enjoy cleaning and restoring/repairing hardware. I enjoy playing the games that I have. To me, going on the net and finding a torrent of every game for system x sucks all of the fun out of classic gaming as there is zero challenge to that. No thrill of the hunt or finding an elusive game for a great price. Add to that less than stellar experience of building/configuring a system, configuring the software, finding the correct drivers, figuring out how to interface controllers, etc and for me, emulation is not an enjoyable experience. But I assure you, I'm no less of a classic gamer than anybody else on this site, including yourself. You really need to re-read my posts, and stop putting words in my mouth. Nowhere did I suggest that collectors are wasting their time or money. It's your time and money, spend it as you see fit. All I suggested is that emulation isn't anywhere near as bad or inaccurate as lots of collectors insist. You keep telling me I don't want to have classic gaming hardware, when I've said - like 3 times now - I DO actually own classic gaming hardware. Quite a bit of it actually.

That's an interesting perspective. I sometimes find myself doing the same thing: I don't have enough space to keep all my classic systems hooked up (although I hope to someday), so I'll often fall back on emulation if there's something I want to play just to get a "quick fix". For example, I own a 99/4A and I love playing Parsec with the Speech Synthesizer. Even though I'm aware that the speech doesn't sound quite as good through emulation, I'm not above firing it up in an emulator during those times when my 99/4A is in storage. I'm aware of the differences as I'm playing it, but in that particular moment, the convenience is more important to me. It's not so important, though, that it makes me want to get rid of all my original hardware, in the same way that your music downloads don't entirely take the place of your sizable vinyl collection. Whatever your particular interest, it's all a matter of whether you're sufficiently passionate enough about it to devote time and space and effort to it. If you are, the more expedient alternatives are simply another way of enjoying the originals. Here's another analogy I'll offer for everyone's consideration. If you enjoy seeing faraway places, you have at least two choices: you can travel and see them in person and collect pictures and other mementos from your trips, or you can stay home and watch The Travel Channel or the Discovery Channel all day and order the physical artifacts online. The couch potato might say that he can see all the same things that the traveler sees this way without having to deal with all the "headaches" of traveling, but I think most people would agree that this does not capture the full experience of traveling. If you've traveled to a certain country in person years ago, and if a Discovery Channel special about that country comes on, you might enjoy watching it for an hour just to relive your visit in your mind. But does that then take the place of the original experience, and is it enough to make you say "wow, if I had known about this, I never would have had to go there in person!"? I think not. Calling people lazy couch potatoes isn't going to help this discussion become more civil.