Hackers have had Sony's PlayStation 4 in their targets ever since its launch just over two years ago. The persistence paid off earlier this month as a GitHub user finally cracked Sony's security, a milestone that paved the way for one homebrew group to achieve an impressive feat of its own.
A group known as fail0verflow has managed to load a full version of Linux onto the console. As VentureBeat explains, exact details on how they pulled off the feat haven't yet been disclosed but the team apparently found weaknesses in one of the system's chipsets.
In the clip above, the group suggests that the Marvell engineers that designed the machine's southbridge must have been "smoking some real good stuff" (and / or felt like reinventing PCI their own way). Either way, it's a major step forward for the homebrew community.
fail0verflow also demonstrated that they were able to install and run a Game Boy Advance emulator and play a Pokémon game. The publication even notes that they connected a Game Boy Advance to the PS4 to serve as a controller.
"CTurt," the GitHub user that first cracked the PS4 earlier this month, explained the process he used in a lengthy post on the site. In it, he points to a WebKit vulnerability in firmware version 1.76 that seems instrumental in the jailbreak.
Image courtesy Shizuo Kambayashi, Associated Press