George Hotz — or GeoHot, if you prefer — was known as “the kid who cracked the iPhone” back when he was 17-years-old. Now, roughly three years later, he claims he’s hacked the PlayStation 3 and is linking to the exploit today.
Last week, hacker George Hotz blogged that he had hacked the PlayStation 3. He spoke with the BBC on Monday announcing his exploits — and today, he’s releasing the exploit to the public.
“In the interest of openness, I’ve decided to release the exploit,” Hotz wrote on his blog. “Hopefully, this will ignite the PS3 scene, and you will organize and figure out how to use this to do practical things, like the iPhone when jailbreaks were first released. I have a life to get back to and can’t keep working on this all day and night.”
Hotz rose to prominence in 2007 when he released a hack for the iPhone. In an interview with the BBC, he said his exploits are motivated purely by curiosity. He also told the news outlet that though hacking the PS3 means users can run pirated games, he’ll have nothing to do with that aspect of hacking the PS3.
The hack gives users full access to the PS3’s memory and “therefore ring 0 access from OtherOS.”
A financial performance update reveals Ubisoft’s plans for DS development, game delays, and new games.
According to a financial performance report, Ubisoft is delaying Splinter Cell: Conviction and R.U.S.E. to April 2010 and a hazy “2010-2011″ respectively.
The also report says Ubisoft is developing new titles for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and scaling back development for Nintendo DS games. CEO Yves Guillemot revealed that the company fell short of its financial goals this year between shrinking sales in the DS and Wii casual markets and under-performing or under-selling titles like James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game.
Interestingly, the report lists the Conviction and R.U.S.E. delays as contributing factors in Ubisoft’s operating losses, suggesting that they’re not part of a financial strategy to shield the games from competition in the February release lineup. Calls to Ubisoft for comment on this matter were not immediately returned.
It’s not all bad news out of Ubisoft, however, as the report also reveals that Assassin’s Creed 2 sales topped 6 million and that the game is on-track to hit 9 million by the end of March.
Going forward, Ubisoft plans to scale back development for the DS and ramp up development on its major franchises on Xbox 360 and PS3. The report reveals that Ubisoft is already working on a new game in the Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon series, Driver, a fourth Raving Rabbids game and a new “episode” of Assassin’s Creed which they say will have an online multiplayer mode.
Sam is changing gears. In Conviction, he’s not hiding the shadows anymore. Now, he’s blending in with the crowd.
His daughter is dead. His status as a nonofficial cover operative for the CIA has disintegrated. And now, Sam Fisher is on the run from the NSA. Double Agent’s final “To Be Continued” message was one hell of an understatement.
Last September, Ubisoft made a widely-publicized oopsie when it posted two gigabytes of promotional material (regarding games both announced and unrevealed) on its public FTP. Double Agent hadn’t even been released, but the first hints of its sequel spread across the internet in a feverish blaze. Images of a bearded Sam Fisher, sporting long hair and civilian clothes, sparked rumor and debate overshadowed only by Double Agent’s long-awaited release the following month.
Until recently, talk of the fifth Sam Fisher game was the stuff of wonder and speculation. Now, with facts in hand, Splinter Cell: Conviction is preparing a debut under the revealing rays of the noonday sun. And we do mean revealing-Sam will be stepping into daylight this time around for what looks to be, for him, a very different take on stealth combat.
Like Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft’s other stealth game currently under development, Conviction will find Sam using crowds as a form of dynamically-shifting cover. In place of a ’shadow’ gauge, the game will sport a ‘danger’ gauge, serving as a visual cue to relate to the player just how much hot water they’re in at any given moment, no matter the time of day. The trick to keeping that gauge low will be to follow the ebb and flow of the crowds, moving at the same pace and in the same manner as the commoners.
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MAG is only a month away from release, and based on reactions from closed beta players it appears that the massive multiplayer shooter will make a big splash when it hits in January. We recently got a chance to talk to Zipper lead designer Ben Jones about how his team managed to handle the tribulations of such a huge shooter experience.
GamePro: Why is 256 the magic number? Did the team decide on this number based on what was feasible on the PS3, or was it more based around what Zipper wanted to do with the armies in the game?
Ben Jones: Once we discovered that networking an unprecedented amount of players was possible on the PS3 we were determined to organize them in a practical manner. Forming eight player squads was always our goal, but we arrived at 256 by using traditional military structure to form players into platoons or 32 and companies of 128.
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The latest Final Fantasy game has sold more than 1.8 million copies in the four days since it’s 12/17 release, but Yoichi Wada hopes to break 2 million (more than half of all Japanese PS3 owners) by 2010.
Square Enix’s roleplaying spectacle-spinner Final Fantasy XIII sold over 1.5 million units in its first four days on store shelves, reports Japanese tracker Enterbrain. Not bad at all, considering the game’s only available for the PlayStation 3 in Japan (the English-language version for both PS3 and Xbox 360 doesn’t ship until next March). Square Enix president Yoichi Wada revealed the company has already shipped 1.8 million copies, and expressed hope sales would reach the 2 million mark shortly.
Some perspective: Sony’s Japanese PS3 install base stands at around 4 million units. Plug the 1.5 million figure in and you get 38 percent of that base holding a copy of Final Fantasy XIII. What’s more, if Wada’s forecast is accurate, we’ll see that number soar to roughly half of all Japanese PS3 owners in the coming weeks.
According to Enterbrain, the next bestselling PS3 game in Japan is Konami’s action-sneaker Metal Gear Solid 4, with just under 700,000 copies sold to date. Final Fantasy XIII just doubled that in its first four days on sale. By comparison, Metal Gear Solid 4 moved some 476,000 copies during its preliminary four-day sales window.
Major franchises always drive hardware sales. PS3 sales surged nearly 70,000 units, for instance, during Metal Gear Solid 4’s introductory sales week in Japan. No surprise then that PS3 sales are up dramatically around Final Fantasy XIII’s release, topping nearly 250,000 according to Enterbrain, or roughly 100,000 more than the system’s prior high point when Sony release its slim-line PS3 in September.
Final Fantasy as a franchise can claim some 92 million units sold worldwide. The last in series, Final Fantasy XII for the PlayStation 2, sold over 2 million copies in Japan.
