It's already somewhat involved to get new firmware on a lot of network connected home devices you buy, but it'll become even more difficult.
3D printers are about to get pushed over the edge via legislation.
Tractors.... gestures wildly at Deere
You can't fix software problems in your dishwasher or fridge.
Liability lawsuits drive a lot of this :/
That should especially include cars and phones, with 10x min damages if a vendor or insurance company falsely claims firmware modifications were at fault if problems arise.
(So, if you turn off unnecessary cabin beeping, and then get in an accident and the insurance company rejects because of “unauthorized modifications”, then they pay you and the other party at least 10x actual damages if they end up losing in court.)
Vendor retaliation (undismissable nag screens, force pushed regressions and compatibility breaks) should have even higher damages.
This would immediately enable people to run secure, open variants of android, and also mod their iPhones.
> Hey boss, as your attorney I think we should ban employees from ever leaning on things because what if one of them got a spinal injury from leaning too much? We could be liable for permitting leaning when they could be cleaning.
That's the official line a lot of the vendors responsible will push, but the evidence for that is...lacking.
Compare that to the simple reality that doing this is more profitable and devices that can't be easily repaired lead to more consistent sales. Capitalism gonna capitalism.
And in the case of true fear of liability lawsuits, even that also has capitalist greed undertones:
Imagine you're building random-iot-device-with-a-lithium-battery. You could:
1. Build the whole thing so it's easily hackable
Your lawyers point out prior art in liability cases around exploding/burning lithium-powered-devices and won't really approve release without some precautionary measures
2. Properly isolate and test the battery and related systems, ensure they can't possibly overheat even in the face of arbitrary input from the rest of the system, if modified. Lock down the battery parts, leave everything else open.
3. Do some testing on the whole-ass system to assuage your lawyers, and then lock the whole thing down
3 is typically cheaper, a lot of companies then open door 3 instead of 2.
Capitalism and liability lawsuits tag teaming here imo
Side note, the reason we have a litigious society imo is because most companies reach for door #4
4. Yolo, release unsafe product even with company's own firmware, fires and explosions ensue, people are maimed and die, lawsuits follow. Because lawsuits are the only recourse, we don't hold the companies criminally liable or anything.
That's more than enough to avoid civil liability for user stupidity
Locking shit down is something you do for other reasons entirely
Then respond with more capitalism and don't buy devices that are not user-serviceable.
- Buy a PC instead of a PS5/Xbox
- Buy appliances that are compatible with Home Assistant, or stick to "dumb" devices
- Refuse to connect to the Internet devices such as TVs and cars that do not strictly need it, regardless of "convenience"
- Reject proprietary software and apps
- Only buy phones whose bootloader is unlockable, so that the stock OS can be replaced by something user-controlled
This isn't really an issue where capitalism prevails in favor of the user like with some privacy issues. We need legislation to pass.
Laws don't prevent firms from doing illegal things. Without public awareness, nothing will change.
And for those that don't: we now have a legal channel to report them to. Having the government enforce its laws is more effective than trying to arrange a general boycott.
- offer a locked and unlocked version and let the free market decide which is preferred. Provide an unlock option that divorces the device from corporate control and release the hardware to the customer (i.e. a MacBook that can be unlocked and put Linux on, but can never be used for macos again)
- subject to FTC anti-monopolistic regulations just like other industries. In some alternate universe, the FTC decided that sony should not have a monopoly on PS5 games, and competitors should have the ability to enter the market. This is the converse to unlocking, although competitors would still be bound to preventing copyright infringement.
That’s specific to Democrat controlled states, unlike age verification requirements. They’ve decided to treat everyone like prisoners rather than imprison criminals.
We now have the network effect affecting devices too :)
Are we sure about this? I always thought that if you modify something and the modification injures you then the OEM shouldn't be liable. This sounds like a shallow dig at liability.
Imagine, for instance, if you bought a flat head screwdriver, but the manufacturer told you that you could never, ever, under any circumstances use it to pry something open. It was stricly to be used for installing or removing screws.
We would all laugh that vendor out of the room and tell them they're insane. Somehow we stopped doing that with all sorts of newer technologies.
Try filing a warranty claim if it bends, the manufacturer will go and tell you to kick rocks.
(This is supposed to be satire but feels scarily accurate anyway.)
The whole set of software IP rules seems like mental gymnastics to justify a career (that I like, support, and benefit from) rather than rules that come from axioms or ethics that make sense.
92.2M units sold, as of today 1 unit? running Linux.
I think you are misinterpreting that number. It would be better read as "as of today, the first PS5 running Linux". There were people running racks of PS3s as Linux servers back in the day not as gaming stations but compute using its hardware. People will do crazy things. Do not write them off.
Not everything needs to have political, teenage angst applied to it.
90M+ consoles sold is proof society has completely accepted the idea of a locked ecosystem with hardware they don’t get to control.
The PS5 is a games console and is marketed as such, not a general-purpose computer. Of course they want, and "force", you to use it to play PS5 games. I have a hard time seeing this as coercive when computers still exist, even if architecturally a PS5 is virtually identical to a general-purpose computer in most of the ways that matter, because at least since the Fairchild Channel F, it's always been the case that consoles are just constrained computers.
> Imagine, for instance, if you bought a flat head screwdriver, but the manufacturer told you that you could never, ever, under any circumstances use it to pry something open. It was stricly to be used for installing or removing screws.
> We would all laugh that vendor out of the room and tell them they're insane. Somehow we stopped doing that with all sorts of newer technologies.
Imagine, for instance, if that flat head screwdriver had a means to prevent you from using it to pry things open. Some kind of magical negative mass in the handle that kicks in to cancel out leverage but not torque, or an explosive charge that blows your hand off if more than a certain amount of force is applied non-rotationally, or something. It might seem a little less risible then, and you would probably just opt to buy a screwdriver that doesn't have such restrictions (especially if those restrictions were explosively enforced).
Like, I get it. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the argument that we should be able to do whatever we want with hardware that we own. At the same time, being upset about the PS5 making it impossible to run arbitrary software without hacking feels a little like being upset that your washing machine doesn't clean your dirty dishes as well as it cleans your dirty laundry: it's not made for that, and it's not really reasonable to expect it to be able to do that well if at all.
Except that's so completely not like what's going on with modern hardware. They're taking general purpose computers and restricting you from doing general purpose computing on them. Like, a dishwasher is made to wash dishes. It has a shape and a design made for washing dishes. You would need to make physical modifications to get it to wash clothes. This is like taking a machine that could wash both dishes and clothes and intentionally stopping it from washing clothes.
This is not OK. This needs to stop. Soon they'll come for our general-purpose computing with "features" for DRM.
> Soon they'll come for our general-purpose computing with "features" for DRM.
You... haven't noticed all of the existing DRM features?
But so much tech hardware is commodified. A pregnancy test probably isn't using hardware dissimilar to your laptop. It just has less of it.
I don't think there's an expectation that every electronic is user programmable. But anything that is general phrpose should be punished as such for trying to put in excessive restrictions. There are arguments for game consoles on both aisles, but I don't agree with the mentality of "anything with general hardware needs general programming ability"
Sony has had this business model since the original PlayStation (1994), but it doesn't seem to have destroyed the ability to run Linux on your PC, or to have a Linux-based game console like the Steam Deck or Steam Machine.
You may also be surprised that some people consider the fixed-function design of game consoles to be a positive thing.
This is like a post saying someone got Apple Basic running on their Commodore 64.
Hardware we buy should be open to be modified easily with a common open source scheme - but any modifications should void warranty.
At the same time, we don't live in that world and so this post and the work done is still cool and exciting.
The problem, of course, is that ordinary people don't care at first, because at first the collar is only installed around your neck and not yet used to shock you, and people with no eye for the future say, what's the big deal? It's just a collar.
It's only after they're around enough necks that people start getting zapped for modifying the OS, but even then some people will say, it's for your own good, why are you defending "hackers"?
Then people start getting shocked for trying to compete with the incumbents or expressing unpopular opinions, but by that point every device without a collar is some kind of obscure Linux Phone with a high price and low specs.
Now you're at the point where all someone has to do is make a competitive device which is otherwise identical to the one they were going to make anyway but it doesn't come with a shock collar and ordinary people will want it because they're tired of getting screwed. But the same critics will show up to say that ordinary people don't care about that and point to the fact that they didn't when it was first being rolled out and nobody was getting electrocuted yet.
Let's say I want to build a drone from scratch.
Instead, it has been hijacked by those who have never opened a PC before or were never interested in the field to begin with and saw it as a VC vehicle get-rich-quick scheme infiltrated by tons of grifters.
Once the money dries up post-extraction then they (grifters) abandon the field to the true 'hackers' still in the field doing clever projects like this one.
Overall, it just shows that the hacker ethos never went any where. It's just younger people being exposed and thinking it's something new.
I'd love to do stuff like this but am still looking for a job. Let alone one with proper work life balances.
(To me) it seems that, he is saying how bad the situation of hardware/lock-in is that we are being excited over being able to run our own software on said hardware in the first place (Aka the reason why we are here)
Being able to run doom on pregnancy tester is actually good. If I paid for the tester, I am gonna use the whole tester to run doom (LOL)
So I think this is what they meant.
After Yaroze, Sony thought PS2Linux would bring some indies into PS2, instead it got full of MAME and other emulators, hence why PS3 no longer offered graphics acceleration.
But “we” have to own that the reason that Sony stopped selling/supporting Linux in their machines is because “we” used it to circumvent copyright on closed-source games. It is the problem with “our” ethics, not theirs that led to Linux getting pulled.
In any case OtherOS didn't have access to the full system resources and, on top of that, Sony actually lost money on PS3s because it was priced as a loss-leader, with game purchases being supposed to earn the actual money.
I would have thought we'd have soft-mods to allow this within a couple weeks of any new console launch, and perhaps the hardware vendors would even be supporting it by now.
I was really looking forward to the Steam Machine but the RAM shortage ruined their plans.
I want to support gaming on linux, and the steam machine was what made it great.
That's not true? Nearly every laptop, desktop, and server can trivially run whatever OS+software, of course, but also currently at least virtually all Android devices can run arbitrary user built/supplied software (I grant that, unfortunately, replacing the OS is often harder). Embedded stuff varies, but frequently anything capable of running a general purpose OS (which IMHO is generally the line to call it a "computer") can have it replaced.
>> Embedded stuff varies, but frequently anything capable of running a general purpose OS (which IMHO is generally the line to call it a "computer") can have it replaced.
A microwave isn't generally viewed as a computer. In particular, if not even the manufacturer isn't running arbitrary code on it (only a tiny little program to do... microwave stuff...) then I view it as out of scope to an argument about artificially-restricted computers.
Also, replace "consumers" by "people" who might need to control their devices to do things that may be against the interests of the manufacturer, like removing ads and surveillance.
Maybe sco and similar would have managed to fight against windows, but i suspect online would be decades behind what it is without the freedom we knew in the 80s and 90s that so many HN pundits are salivating to grow away.
Maybe a minitel system would be better - we would t have the problems of social media at least.
In such an alternate timeline there may be another operating system even better than Linux.
It also depends on the criteria on which you judge it. I may be better in terms of compatibility because everything would be an expensive walled garden like Apple's. It would be worse in terms of choice because niche peripheral makers might not be able to enter the market at all. And it would certainly, almost guaranteed, be much much worse in terms of personal freedom because no-one would be allowed to modify any parts of any piece of software without some cryptographic hardware module stopping them. Imagine that situation, and then imagine how a government would use that to impose surveillance on all personal computing devices.
Something doesn't add up.
It reduces security, expands attack surface, reputational damage from people complaining about their phones bricking doing something unsupported.
>We've been able to run anything on PCs for over 40 years
And the PC platform has had terrible security. Do not use it as an example of everything being fine. You are forgetting the malware for PCs which would spread by writing a custom operating system on a removal media. Then that removable media is plugged into another PC and when that PC boots up it boots that operating system which goes ahead and infects the OS installed to the hard disk along with any other removable media.
Since you picked the phone as an example, right now when I search for ChatGPT in the Play Store, the top app is a fake app with a counterfeit logo. Is it really this platform which was supposed to improve security?
I'm curious about thermal behavior under sustained load. The PS5's cooling is tuned tightly to the stock firmware's power envelope; running arbitrary Linux workloads probably hits different thermal profiles. Did you see throttling during long gaming sessions, or is the headroom sufficient when you're not pushing the RSX equivalent?
The driver change to support the actual PS5 was a 1-line fix to make it recognize the slightly different GPU ID on the PS5
He did post the 1-line patch for Mesa to add GPU support like I said above: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/40...
Also, can you do this and still be able to access the original OS? It be nice to run Linux on it, but I'd also need to access my PS5 library, so do I need two machines for this?
It's just a shame Sony gatekeeps running any kind of personal code on the platform and that access to development tools is a total nightmare.
tl;dr Get a copy of Star Wars: Racer Revenge (ps4) before it goes over $200.
The only big difference is consoles have the CPU using GDDR memory (what dedicated GPUs use) instead of typical DDR. You're not going to need to code anything differently for that but it will have different performance characteristics.
The PS5 only has 8GiB.
Your best ~$300-400 option for inference is still the RTX 3060 AFAIK.
Anybody running any AI models using the GPU of PS5 or using the ram (16GB).
PS5 is probably sold at a loss/bare minimum profit to turn profit during the gaming product itself, not the hardware as compared to the steam machine
So running Linux on PS5 is so freaking cool. Gonna have to share this article with my brother who owns one.
This reminds me of that time when US govt. bought over 1700* (see derektank's comment) PS3 or similar and hooked them up all together to make a supercomputer because this way it costed them less than having a computer themselves and Today's ram prices being 5 times higher in such short term is yea.
PS5 hacking community feels really cool!
AMD sold binned PS5 chips to crytomining endeavors. They resold the boards on eBay for cheap. So there's a history of people tinkering with rejected PS5 chips from cheap eBay purchases. That work lead to amdgpu/Mesa support, which is why this guy has raytracing on a real PS5.
They're binned down a little from the production PS5, but even at full power it's bit the best bang for the buck. For a model that needs 16 GB of RAM, a $100 used AMD Mi25 is the cheapest way to go, and a $200 used 16GB Intel A770 scales that up, at around double the performance for around double the price.
https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/114782/plays...
From the link that you shared:
It's currently the seventh-greenest computer in the world, he said.
"This particular system is about half a petaflop, or capable of about 500 trillion calculations per second," he said. "In the current time that we can measure it, it's about the 35th- or 36th-fastest computer in the world, and with some things that are going to be changing in the next eight or nine months with some upgrades, we could boost it to maybe the 20th-fastest computer in the world, and at the same time make it, at that moment in time, the greenest computer."
Do you feel like something like this can again be possible with Linux being ported to PS5 now? I don't quite understand why sony would remove the linux feature from ps4 if this was something that the govt. was benefitting from. I assume that the govt. must have put some pressure to still allow linux on ps4/ps5 given that it was benefitting from it in the past?
They added it to avoid game console specific tariffs, so they must have run the numbers and realized paying those would cost less than subsidizing a bunch of clusters.
Sony only removed OtherOS on the Fat after George Hotz discovered and published an exploit that allowed users to break out of the OtherOS sandbox and gain full control over the PS3. This allowed running custom firmware and pirating games with a bit of additional work. Sony judged that they couldn't patch the exploit without disabling access to OtherOS entirely, so that's what they did. Hotz announced his exploit in January 2010 (https://web.archive.org/web/20100129034435/http://geohotps3....), the Yellow Dog Linux team posted a rumor that Sony was getting rid of OtherOS in February 2010 (https://www.xtremeps3.com/2010/02/20/rumor-alert-otheros-to-...), and Sony officially announced the removal of OtherOS due to security concerns in late March 2010 (https://blog.playstation.com/2010/03/28/ps3-firmware-v3-21-u...). As you say, this removal was later found to be illegal in court.
[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/ukraine-warehouse-packed-with-thou...
I naively think that there are not many people willing to buy coins off of a shady website. Especially since I think the people who are most likely to want to cheat an edge are teenagers with limited funds. Would also expect that the bots are a glowing aberration vs standard player behavior.
IIRC they were sitting next to the energy company, tapped illegal electricity, and hidden that fact (the energy company's involvement was under investigation). Criminals don't play fair.
Diablo 3 was one of the earlier games having RMT, and they let community decide to keep or remove it, as it wasn't profitable due to the massive amount of fraud and CS requirement.
Later on, two mobile Blizzard games had RMT and then closed shop: Hearthstone Mercenaries, and Warcraft Rumble. I played both, and fool me once...
Someone does buy these items, otherwise there wouldn't be spam about RMT everywhere inside online games and on some web sites about these online games.
> Nguyen said the setup only works with a full chain exploit such as Byepervisor, which is aimed at older firmware. The public Byepervisor repository says that support for PS5 firmware in the 1.xx to 2.xx range
https://videocardz.com/newz/modder-turns-playstation-5-into-...
Any plans on having this exploit on newer firmwares. I am sure that someday these new firmwares will get old too and they might get an exploit too.
Am I correct or is there something more to it?