As with my earlier post, here is a follow up and is more technical point of view presentation. Read my point of view and give me yours at the comment section

• Is this USB dongle future-ready?

Sony is pretty serious with piracy and any hacking on the PS3 system, just take a look at geohotz exploit with OtherOS as an example; almost immediately after it was made available, Sony removed the feature. I’m sure Sony can patch up this exploit but might be a little too late. With homebrew enabled by this dongle, hackers would start dumping and decrypting the firmware for further analysis or POSSIBLE custom firmware. Then it will be a cat and mouse game, just look at the PSP scene.

Enough with the firmware patch up, how about hardware reversion to patch up the exploit? Sure, I’m also sure Sony will revise the PS3 hardware to counter the USB dongle, again looking at the approach taken on the PSP’s countermeasures as a parallel example.

I have been looking into the mid and long term solution(s) by Sony, but what about short term? Well, I’m guessing Sony’s approach is that they will issue new firmware updates for it. But do keep in mind that the manufacturer’s [PS Jailbreaker] claims that the USB dongle is update-able with downloads from their sites.

• Backing up your games

Seriously, I’ve never made any backup for my legal games cause I don’t see the reason(s) in doing it. Stop kidding yourself by saying that it is better to backup your stuffs. The real reason for making back-ups is piracy. Don’t we all love free stuffs and cheaper alternative? But where can we get it?

Download?! Are you kidding me? You wanna download 30GBs worth of data off the internet? With Streamyx, you are screwed even deeper! Even with UniFi you are still screwed! I know what you are saying, not all PS3 games are dual layered blu ray. Yes, not every games but exclusive games are mostly dual layered. The only games not dual layered are those cross-platform games and the data size is larger than Xbox counterpart. Still, we are talking about 8-9GBs of data to download! But a more serious issue is that we don’t know if the USB dongle will encrypt the external hard drive for backing of games purpose. If it is encrypted, we are screwed AGAIN! This means whatever that you have downloaded cannot be saved into the encrypted hard drive via your PC! We may as well have to procure 1 hard drive per game. You see, what you’ve downloaded may very well be an image of the encrypted hard drive, then you have to clone the image again to your hard drive!

How bout bringing your hard drive to shops and ask them to ‘save’ it for ya? Good solution but they gonna charge ya~! But at least is a cheaper alternative.

• Can I still use PSN? [Playstation Network]

I’m not sure if you still can or not use PSN whilst playing with backup but the main question here is, do you DARE to play backup on PSN? I remembered the folks over at Xbox were furious that their paid account and services were terminated prematurely by Microsoft. The reason? You guessed it. Those folks were using backup games. You see, Microsoft didn’t ban them on the spot, what Microsoft did was compile a list of ‘suspects’ and when the timing is right, Microsoft goes wild on a banning spree.

So what about Sony? I can’t tell. Mostly to be more or less [to emulate] the same with Microsoft tactic, unleashing a banning spree. Or perhaps preventing you from accessing PSN. Or worse, turn your PS3 into a thousand ringgit paperweight, in other words bricking it.

But how will Sony knows that you were using backup? Well, one thing for sure, the USB dongle turned your retail PS3 into a debug/dev unit. Therefore, it is safe to assume that a debug/dev unit will give out a different ‘scent’ than normal PS3. All Sony will do is to send out ‘dogs’ unit to sniff out those debug/dev units which are logged-on to PSN.

The solution? Well, don’t ever login to PSN if you had ever used the dongle before. Might be a little harsh but do think about it, although you have unplugged your dongle and access PSN (with the dongle unlugged), there is bound to be some leftover ‘scent’ too. But that is just my speculation. In any case, I’m not ready to lose my PSN/trophies account, I’ve already lost my PSN account before due to my PSP’s CFW [Custom Firmware].

• Will there be a cheaper alternative?

Cheaper alternative as in Made in China stuff I assume? The irony of this is that the USB dongle is FROM China to begin with! You see, OzModChip said earlier that out of the blue he received a package containing the USB dongle which by the way the package is sent from Hong Kong!

So why the high price? For one thing is that the USB dongle is the ONLY thing to hack your PS3. If this isn’t an exclusive then what is. An exclusive product ‘deserves’ a higher price, think of it as monopoly. The higher price is also justified for the R&D cost, hey it is just business. Besides, at this early stage it will attract reviewers and tech enthusiast who by the way doesn’t really mind the price. What a good way to suck them for cash huh? And don’t forget Sony is gonna buy them to check it out too. Sony will buy these USB suckers even at rm4800!

So what about the rest of us? Rest assure, I’m sure someone in China is trying to get their hands on the dongle and trying to reverse engineer it. Once it is done, price will drop but quality wise I really can’t tell.

So, am I ready to buy it? I’m sure as hell that I won’t be buying it. For one thing, I used to support piracy during the PS1 and PS2 era. I decided to stop supporting piracy, instead I will give credit to game developers which they deserve. Besides, in my opinion giving my money to game developers are much better than giving my money to pirates. At least I know the money I spent will be put to good use. Second, during the PS1 and PS2 era, I bought lots of games cause and I didn’t even care if the games are good or not cause they are cheap. To be honest I only completed like 3% of them. I didn’t really feel the joy of gaming. With the current generation of console, I cannot spend like I used to for pirated games, it cost me rm160 per game now. Instead, I researched a bit more about the games, try the demo, and if I like it I will buy it. This way I’m able to enjoy gaming once again and now I have completed all of the games that I’ve bought, except for Eternal Sonata. Finally, I’m not ready to lose my PSN account. I really enjoy online gaming on console. Besides, I don’t want brick my PS3!

So there you have. My technical and personal view of the USB dongle. So now is your turn to tell me yours. Leave me a comment. Thank you for reading and have a nice day

[Originally written by VC_Stargazer]