http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12116051

In the end, the flaw that allowed them to crack the system was a basic cryptographic error that allowed them to compute the private key, held by Sony, he said.

"Sony uses a private key, usually stored in a vault at the company's HQ, to mark firmware as valid and unmodified, and the PS3 only needs a public key to verify that the signature came from Sony.

"Applied correctly, it would take billions of years to derive the private key from the public key, or to make a signature without knowing the private key, even when you have all the computational power in the world at your disposal."

But the team found that Sony had made a "critical mistake" in how it implemented the security.

"The signing recipe requires that a random number be used as part of the calculation, with the caveat that that number must be truly random and not predictable in any way," the team said.

"However, Sony wrote their own signing software, which used a constant number for each signature."

This allowed the team to use "simple algebra" to uncover Sony's secret key, without access to it.

this means you can sign custom firmware and homebrew apps to run on the PS3

so theoretically, besides running emulators and linux, you can install a FTP app on the PS3 and copy .iso files from your PC, then run a signed backup manager (like from debug systems exploited by the already obsolete JailBreak mod) to run the games.

i'm thinking in turning it into a backup computer with Linux. it was really stupid of Sony to limit the original functions, it got hacked anyway.

time to put some good use into this hardware.