7 ms·

In many ways I think it is really quite sad that we're at a point where blown e-fuses, encrypted everything and properly done public/private key crypto means th

In many ways I think it is really quite sad that we're at a point where blown e-fuses, encrypted everything and properly done public/private key crypto means that it's entirely possible that next generation of consoles really might actually be unhackable and unbackupable, barring some tiny bootloader exploit, cheap TEM and an understanding of "physically uncloneable functions", or cheap and plentiful qubits. Things like this are just cool, prevent e-waste, and preserve cultural heritage.

jdefr89 3y ago
As Vulnerability Research is my area of expertise we are finding new attack vectors all the time. Remember with new technology and abstraction you introduce new potential security issues that can be used to subvert other means of protection. It’s a tit for tat non ending cycle. That being said exploitation of consoles and phones has become quite difficult. Enough at least to make me move to embedded security as there is more work to be done there..
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sublinear 3y ago
Console ownership isn't as popular with younger people anymore and their exclusive games are not what they used to be, so I wouldn't worry. We're not losing much. Consoles have been dying for a while.
rusk 3y ago
it saddens me as a vintage games conservator that my present day PS4 will be a brick in a few years. When I have consoles and games going back 40 years. It just doesn’t seem right.
- deergomoo 3y ago
  The thing that has me concerned is that even if you keep the consoles working, and even if you have an extensive library of physical media, these days what’s on the disc is probably an unpatched, incomplete, possibly unplayable mess. That’s not intended as a criticism of game development, just an expression of fear for the preservation implications. It’s no longer enough to preserve what’s in your hands—which is difficult enough where electronics are concerned—but now someone must find some way to extract, archive, and reapply all the day one patches, bug fixes, DLC packs etc.
  - rusk 3y ago
    > someone must find some way to extract, archive, and reapply all the day one patches, bug fixes, DLC packs etc. This is what has to happen. I believe that as these consequences become more and more widely felt you’ll have a pretty strong mandate for some kind of change in thinking. I mean, if you’ve actually bought the game (as opposed to streamed it) I think there’s a strong case to be made that you should be entitled to its use beyond the wishes of the copyright holder.
- theodric 3y ago
  I mean this as earnestly as possible: remember that pain and don't buy a PS5, or a PS6, or [...] Don't build any more emotional relationships with products built by rentiers that refuse to respect your ability to enjoy the perpetuity of your license (and god forbid even considering actually owning anything). Take on an allotment and breed a new hybrid chili pepper, or brew some beer and share it with your neighbors. Beat Galaga for the 11,000th time. Whatever it takes. To hell with Huxley's Brave New World-- a better one is possible if we force it to exist by refusing to continue enabling the system enslaving us.
  - nerdawson 3y ago
    Should we stop playing video games altogether then? If you stick to PC instead, you’re still at the mercy of platforms like Steam. They can, and will, remove games over time. GTA being a great example.
    - hananova 3y ago
      As far as I'm aware Steam has never removed a game. They have unlisted games for several reasons, but that has never affected previous purchases.
    - theodric 3y ago
      I don't know. Maybe. I've gone back and forth on this many times. Wanting to play a video game, and having to learn how to free up enough conventional memory in DOS that I could do so without giving up sound and joystick control, was really my entry into tech. I can't say my life would have been better without them. On the other hand, they're as much of a time sink as you allow them to be, and in the last decade are increasingly also vying to be an unlimited money sink in the form of microtransactions, lootboxes, gimped free-to-play (or even pay-to-play!) with progression held back without paid boosts, etc. Should we want to engage with such dark patterns? Once I got into Linux in the mid 90s, and especially once I really bought into the whole FL/OSS-as-an-ethos activist/evangelist stuff as a late-teen, my gaming options became quite limited. I spent a long time saying playing video games was bad, and a sign of poor life choices. I dialed back my rhetoric as I entered my late 30s, and I own and occasionally use a Steam Deck now. I even "own" Diablo 4 - failing to take my own advice here - but I do find it difficult to convince myself to invest time in what is essentially an MMO that will probably be reset or switched off at some point. There's no sense of permanence, and I have no faith that MicrosoftActivisionBlizzard will keep running D4 services for the next 25 years the way Blizzard did for Diablo II. But I've got the farm now, and that will outlast me, so whatever. "Touch grass" as the kids say, but as a(n a)vocation. That's certainly more than you wanted to read. Sorry.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  OTOH, has there really been any actually culturally significant video games released in recent years? I enjoyed for example the Uncharted games a lot. But I don’t think anything significant will have been lost if future generations of people don’t get to play the Uncharted games, no matter how much I enjoyed them myself. Whereas, things like Pong, and Pac-Man and the first Super Mario games and the Pokémon Red and Blue and Yellow games feel much more important for me, and of course the original Doom, all of these are important on a whole other level. And thankfully they are all sure to be able to be preserved at least in some form.
  - softfalcon 3y ago
    Based on the massively positive response both inside and out of the gaming community… I’m gonna say Baldur’s Gate 3 Seriously, it’s converting people I never in 100 years would have expected to become gamers.
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      Funny because it is the first time I hear there has been 3rd opus of the Baldur's Gate series
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    > OTOH, has there really been any actually culturally significant video games released in recent years? Yes, like -random example here- Uncharted :-P. TBH i do not think what is "culturally significant" is something that we can answer right now, but something that will be up to future people to decide. Though i do think that Uncharted is culturally significant in how it was part of a series of influences from the original Indiana Jones, to Tomb Raider, to Uncharted and back to Tomb Raider (in that each one of those influenced the next) - with some Prince of Persia thrown in for good measure. But for people to be able to tell, judge and discover these things, the games must be available to them - preferably in their original condition (remasters, rereleases, remakes, etc often tend to change things - though those should also be available so these changes can also be seen and perhaps talked about in the future). Also not only "good games" or "influential games" are worthy of preservation - even bad or just mediocre game are worthy of that, for a variety of reasons. Games are often a snapshot of the times they were made at and multiple "snapshots" are always better than a single one. Even from a design perspective, a bad game can be interesting: for example the original Prince of Persia 3D seems to have been largely lost in the sands of time and yet it is an interesting game in its own right despite its flaws, in how its interpretation of (classic) Tomb Raider's controls combined with ideas from the original 2D games around realistic/captured animation ended up creating something inferior to its clear inspirations (but that is clear only really if you know about/have played the games that inspired it and know about/have played the game itself). Of course if you just want to have fun, whatever is available on Steam will more than suffice.
graphe 3y ago
They're all x86 so don't despair. Plus they haven't made a good exclusive since Bloodborne. No Xbox exclusives afaik. Don't worry, gaming peaked a long time ago. There's a huge backlog of great games that are better than their remakes like XCOM. Aside from graphics, I'd say AAA gameplay has even regressed in many ways. Indie games do their own thing and run on PC.
auguzanellato 3y ago
> In many ways I think it is really quite sad that we're at a point where blown e-fuses, encrypted everything and properly done public/private key crypto means that it's entirely possible that next generation of consoles really might actually be unhackable Pirates will always find a way, the Nintendo Switch had all the countermeasures you mentioned, the latest revisions also have a patched bootloader but someone figured out that they could still boot a custom firmware via power fault injection on the SoC.
- jedrek 3y ago
  The Playstation 4 was launched in 2013 and there is no modern hack for it.
  - jiehong 3y ago
    Playstation 5 has been jailbroken, though [0]. Well, even the PS4, actually [1]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cq3K9lBli0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cq3K9lBli0 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxRTGMe_RuE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxRTGMe_RuE
- NotPractical 3y ago
  > Pirates will always find a way Except it's usually not pirates who find these exploits, rather curious tinkerers that want to unlock the full capabilities of the hardware that they own. The pirates / script kiddies usually come in after the groundwork has already been laid by these true hackers. E.g. the people who hacked the Switch in fact condemn piracy and any discussion of it on within their communities will lead to an immediate ban. I'm proud to say that I've hacked my Switch, but have never pirated anything on it. An impressive homebrew scene has formed around the console, which has produced gems such as Mission Control, allowing you to seamlessly pair third party controllers. I use it with my PS4 controllers. https://github.com/ndeadly/MissionControl https://github.com/ndeadly/MissionControl
- jsheard 3y ago
  Nintendo (or rather Nvidia) was behind the curve on fault injection counter-measures, Sony and Microsoft did their homework and it's never been achieved on their last two generations of systems as far as I know. Microsoft openly talked about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo Seriously, console security is getting really good. The Switch had some major hardware blunders between the bootloader bug and fault injection, but the developer of the main Switch CFW project is on record that their custom microkernel is absolutely bulletproof and he expects there will never be another software exploit. If Switch 2 gets the hardware right, there's no way in. https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1486787208333774848 https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1486787208333774848 https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1327721899862888448 https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1327721899862888448 The Playstation is the weakest of the bunch, since they run FreeBSD on bare metal there's a large attack surface and a lot of eyes on the code. The Xbox uses some variant of NT but each application gets its own Hyper-V virtualized NT instance, so to jailbreak you need to escape Hyper-V, which is easier said than done and has a $250,000 bug bounty so MS would probably be the first to be informed.
Cloudef 3y ago
As long as consoles have web browser there is a way. Ps5 was broken recently
- tirant 3y ago
  Why? A web browser does not need to run under any kind of privileged mode, nor its library dependencies…
  - Cloudef 3y ago
    They often have backdoors to the system or vulnerabilities in JIT execution.
cmur 3y ago
I think there’s some hope in the console market via the likes of things like the Steamdeck and other handheld PC devices. Hopefully they’ll get cheaper as time goes on and compete at the same price point as the switch.

jdefr89 3y ago

As Vulnerability Research is my area of expertise we are finding new attack vectors all the time. Remember with new technology and abstraction you introduce new potential security issues that can be used to subvert other means of protection. It’s a tit for tat non ending cycle. That being said exploitation of consoles and phones has become quite difficult. Enough at least to make me move to embedded security as there is more work to be done there..

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sublinear 3y ago

Console ownership isn't as popular with younger people anymore and their exclusive games are not what they used to be, so I wouldn't worry. We're not losing much. Consoles have been dying for a while.

rusk 3y ago

it saddens me as a vintage games conservator that my present day PS4 will be a brick in a few years. When I have consoles and games going back 40 years. It just doesn’t seem right.

deergomoo 3y ago
The thing that has me concerned is that even if you keep the consoles working, and even if you have an extensive library of physical media, these days what’s on the disc is probably an unpatched, incomplete, possibly unplayable mess. That’s not intended as a criticism of game development, just an expression of fear for the preservation implications. It’s no longer enough to preserve what’s in your hands—which is difficult enough where electronics are concerned—but now someone must find some way to extract, archive, and reapply all the day one patches, bug fixes, DLC packs etc.
- rusk 3y ago
  > someone must find some way to extract, archive, and reapply all the day one patches, bug fixes, DLC packs etc. This is what has to happen. I believe that as these consequences become more and more widely felt you’ll have a pretty strong mandate for some kind of change in thinking. I mean, if you’ve actually bought the game (as opposed to streamed it) I think there’s a strong case to be made that you should be entitled to its use beyond the wishes of the copyright holder.
theodric 3y ago
I mean this as earnestly as possible: remember that pain and don't buy a PS5, or a PS6, or [...] Don't build any more emotional relationships with products built by rentiers that refuse to respect your ability to enjoy the perpetuity of your license (and god forbid even considering actually owning anything). Take on an allotment and breed a new hybrid chili pepper, or brew some beer and share it with your neighbors. Beat Galaga for the 11,000th time. Whatever it takes. To hell with Huxley's Brave New World-- a better one is possible if we force it to exist by refusing to continue enabling the system enslaving us.
- nerdawson 3y ago
  Should we stop playing video games altogether then? If you stick to PC instead, you’re still at the mercy of platforms like Steam. They can, and will, remove games over time. GTA being a great example.
  - hananova 3y ago
    As far as I'm aware Steam has never removed a game. They have unlisted games for several reasons, but that has never affected previous purchases.
  - theodric 3y ago
    I don't know. Maybe. I've gone back and forth on this many times. Wanting to play a video game, and having to learn how to free up enough conventional memory in DOS that I could do so without giving up sound and joystick control, was really my entry into tech. I can't say my life would have been better without them. On the other hand, they're as much of a time sink as you allow them to be, and in the last decade are increasingly also vying to be an unlimited money sink in the form of microtransactions, lootboxes, gimped free-to-play (or even pay-to-play!) with progression held back without paid boosts, etc. Should we want to engage with such dark patterns? Once I got into Linux in the mid 90s, and especially once I really bought into the whole FL/OSS-as-an-ethos activist/evangelist stuff as a late-teen, my gaming options became quite limited. I spent a long time saying playing video games was bad, and a sign of poor life choices. I dialed back my rhetoric as I entered my late 30s, and I own and occasionally use a Steam Deck now. I even "own" Diablo 4 - failing to take my own advice here - but I do find it difficult to convince myself to invest time in what is essentially an MMO that will probably be reset or switched off at some point. There's no sense of permanence, and I have no faith that MicrosoftActivisionBlizzard will keep running D4 services for the next 25 years the way Blizzard did for Diablo II. But I've got the farm now, and that will outlast me, so whatever. "Touch grass" as the kids say, but as a(n a)vocation. That's certainly more than you wanted to read. Sorry.
codetrotter 3y ago
OTOH, has there really been any actually culturally significant video games released in recent years? I enjoyed for example the Uncharted games a lot. But I don’t think anything significant will have been lost if future generations of people don’t get to play the Uncharted games, no matter how much I enjoyed them myself. Whereas, things like Pong, and Pac-Man and the first Super Mario games and the Pokémon Red and Blue and Yellow games feel much more important for me, and of course the original Doom, all of these are important on a whole other level. And thankfully they are all sure to be able to be preserved at least in some form.
- softfalcon 3y ago
  Based on the massively positive response both inside and out of the gaming community… I’m gonna say Baldur’s Gate 3 Seriously, it’s converting people I never in 100 years would have expected to become gamers.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    Funny because it is the first time I hear there has been 3rd opus of the Baldur's Gate series
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  > OTOH, has there really been any actually culturally significant video games released in recent years? Yes, like -random example here- Uncharted :-P. TBH i do not think what is "culturally significant" is something that we can answer right now, but something that will be up to future people to decide. Though i do think that Uncharted is culturally significant in how it was part of a series of influences from the original Indiana Jones, to Tomb Raider, to Uncharted and back to Tomb Raider (in that each one of those influenced the next) - with some Prince of Persia thrown in for good measure. But for people to be able to tell, judge and discover these things, the games must be available to them - preferably in their original condition (remasters, rereleases, remakes, etc often tend to change things - though those should also be available so these changes can also be seen and perhaps talked about in the future). Also not only "good games" or "influential games" are worthy of preservation - even bad or just mediocre game are worthy of that, for a variety of reasons. Games are often a snapshot of the times they were made at and multiple "snapshots" are always better than a single one. Even from a design perspective, a bad game can be interesting: for example the original Prince of Persia 3D seems to have been largely lost in the sands of time and yet it is an interesting game in its own right despite its flaws, in how its interpretation of (classic) Tomb Raider's controls combined with ideas from the original 2D games around realistic/captured animation ended up creating something inferior to its clear inspirations (but that is clear only really if you know about/have played the games that inspired it and know about/have played the game itself). Of course if you just want to have fun, whatever is available on Steam will more than suffice.

graphe 3y ago

They're all x86 so don't despair. Plus they haven't made a good exclusive since Bloodborne. No Xbox exclusives afaik. Don't worry, gaming peaked a long time ago. There's a huge backlog of great games that are better than their remakes like XCOM. Aside from graphics, I'd say AAA gameplay has even regressed in many ways. Indie games do their own thing and run on PC.

auguzanellato 3y ago

> In many ways I think it is really quite sad that we're at a point where blown e-fuses, encrypted everything and properly done public/private key crypto means that it's entirely possible that next generation of consoles really might actually be unhackable Pirates will always find a way, the Nintendo Switch had all the countermeasures you mentioned, the latest revisions also have a patched bootloader but someone figured out that they could still boot a custom firmware via power fault injection on the SoC.

jedrek 3y ago
The Playstation 4 was launched in 2013 and there is no modern hack for it.
- jiehong 3y ago
  Playstation 5 has been jailbroken, though [0]. Well, even the PS4, actually [1]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cq3K9lBli0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cq3K9lBli0 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxRTGMe_RuE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxRTGMe_RuE
NotPractical 3y ago
> Pirates will always find a way Except it's usually not pirates who find these exploits, rather curious tinkerers that want to unlock the full capabilities of the hardware that they own. The pirates / script kiddies usually come in after the groundwork has already been laid by these true hackers. E.g. the people who hacked the Switch in fact condemn piracy and any discussion of it on within their communities will lead to an immediate ban. I'm proud to say that I've hacked my Switch, but have never pirated anything on it. An impressive homebrew scene has formed around the console, which has produced gems such as Mission Control, allowing you to seamlessly pair third party controllers. I use it with my PS4 controllers. https://github.com/ndeadly/MissionControl https://github.com/ndeadly/MissionControl
jsheard 3y ago
Nintendo (or rather Nvidia) was behind the curve on fault injection counter-measures, Sony and Microsoft did their homework and it's never been achieved on their last two generations of systems as far as I know. Microsoft openly talked about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo Seriously, console security is getting really good. The Switch had some major hardware blunders between the bootloader bug and fault injection, but the developer of the main Switch CFW project is on record that their custom microkernel is absolutely bulletproof and he expects there will never be another software exploit. If Switch 2 gets the hardware right, there's no way in. https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1486787208333774848 https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1486787208333774848 https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1327721899862888448 https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1327721899862888448 The Playstation is the weakest of the bunch, since they run FreeBSD on bare metal there's a large attack surface and a lot of eyes on the code. The Xbox uses some variant of NT but each application gets its own Hyper-V virtualized NT instance, so to jailbreak you need to escape Hyper-V, which is easier said than done and has a $250,000 bug bounty so MS would probably be the first to be informed.

Cloudef 3y ago

As long as consoles have web browser there is a way. Ps5 was broken recently

tirant 3y ago
Why? A web browser does not need to run under any kind of privileged mode, nor its library dependencies…
- Cloudef 3y ago
  They often have backdoors to the system or vulnerabilities in JIT execution.

cmur 3y ago

I think there’s some hope in the console market via the likes of things like the Steamdeck and other handheld PC devices. Hopefully they’ll get cheaper as time goes on and compete at the same price point as the switch.