[monocasa]

PS3, and supposedly that was because some jurisdictions treated game consoles and computers differently for import tariffs (computers being cheaper to import), but those jurisdictions changed to not having a distinction.

Agreed with the underlying point you're making though. They allow this because it aligns with their current strategic objectives, and changes to those objectives can be arbitrary and capricious, at least from the viewpoint of the consumer.

[pricci]

I remember it was because geohot "jailbreaked" the PS3 using the Linux capabilities to some extent.

But I could be wrong.

[svenpeter]

There were two versions of the PS3: The original model and a slimmed down version released after a few years.

the timeline was something like this:

- Sony released the original PS3 with Linux running under a hypervisor that locked certain things (e.g. 3D rendering and their DRM)

- Sony released the PS3 slim without Linux. They claimed they didn't have the resources to make Linux run on it. (We later figured out all that was required were a few incredibly simple kernel patches)

- geohot found a somewhat unstable hardware glitch that, with some luck and a few tries, could escalate to hypervisor mode and enable e.g. 3D rendering from Linux. Their DRM was still untouched at this point and no one really cared.

- Sony released an update for the old PS3 models to disable Linux as well citing "security concerns"

After that more people started looking into the PS3 and marcan, me and others at fail0verflow eventually figured out their security wasn't all that great. It was actually so bad that we could calculate their private keys. Then they sued us for that but that's another story.

[paulryanrogers]

Got a link to that story?

[svenpeter]

zarvox already linked to the talk we gave at https://media.ccc.de/v/27c3-4087-en-console_hacking_2010.

We talked about how you could compute private keys but didn't release any keys for obvious reasons.

Essentially Sony had N different sets of keys protecting different levels of their system (e.g. one keyset for the hypervisor and another one for the kernel). What we found allowed to compute the private signing key given two public signatures.

Due to some technicality this meant that you needed another bug which allowed to extract these plaintext signatures. (The best comparison today would be that we found a universal code execution bug but you still needed to find your own info leak to defeat ASLR which we either didn't share or didn't have for all keysets).

What happened then was that geohot used this flaw we found together with a simple bug that leaked two plaintext signatures to extract one of the most important keys and published that one on his website.

Sony responded by suing him and us as well - probably because they assumed that we worked together. After a few month they reached a settlement with geohot where he promised to never hack any Sony product ever again. At the same time they simply dropped the lawsuit against marcan, me and a few other friends from fail0verflow without having ever served us. Those months resulted in quite some stress for me and personal and legal issues for another friend.

[zarvox]

https://media.ccc.de/v/27c3-4087-en-console_hacking_2010

[michaelmrose]

I actually think other os got canned before the jailbreak. If I recall correctly it provided extra incentive.

They may have wanted to make it harder to jailbreak. Another argument is that they weren't profitable to sell as computers but largely become profitable via the money they made off games sold for the platform including money paid by game developers.