alt Hacker News> This isn’t the first time that Sony has had to deal with a security crisis with the popular PlayStation family. The PlayStation 3 was previously hit with a vulnerability when the company made a mistake with their cryptography on the console, allowing users to install homebrew software and allow piracy and cheating on popular titles.
Probably could have been avoided if Sony kept the Linux version of the Playstation still alive. Imagine what the (console) world would have looked like, if it was still alive. I never got the chance to even try it myself before it was gone, but I'm sure a lot of the homebrew community's energy could have been redirected towards it instead, hitting two flies with one swath.
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If anyone is interested in the cryptography mistake that Sony made I recommend watching the Console Hacking talk at 27c3 by the fail0verflow team: https://youtu.be/DUGGJpn2_zY?t=2096
I had Yellowdog on mine from the day I bought it until the day Sony erased it. It was not useful. I don't regret doing it and I HATE that they took it away, and I'm a linux/bsd/various-unix daily driver home and work since forever, but this linux system on this hardware was just a curiosity to play with. Too slow and limited by the hardware to be useful.
But it was fun.
> Probably could have been avoided if Sony kept the Linux version of the Playstation still alive.
The causality here is backwards; Sony removed Other OS support precisely because the first jailbreak (a glitching attack) relied on it.