ITGS portfolio. What was the impact of the hacking of the Playstation 3?

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A: PRESENTATION OF THE ISSUE

The PlayStation 3 is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment and the successor to the PlayStation 2 as part of the PlayStation series. The PlayStation 3 competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii. Major features of the console include its unified online gaming service, the PlayStation Network, its robust multimedia capabilities, connectivity with the PlayStation Portable, and its use of the Blu-ray Disc as its primary storage medium. [Wikipedia.org]

On January 22, 2010 a 21 year old hacker, George Hotz, successfully managed to “jailbreak” or in other words gain access to the machine's system memory and processor. Four days later he released the exploit to the general public.

On January 6, 2011 Mr. Hotz released the PS3's master key and published it online. This key (which was a major secret) is used to sign games and latest firmware’s to enable their use on the PlayStation. Now once the key is known, it can be used to sign any software - including unauthorized software and games.

This key can now be used to download and run pirated games.

B: IT BACKGROUND OF THE ISSUE

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PlayStation 3 Specifications and Details

CPU: Cell Processor

PowerPC-based Core @3.2GHz

GPU: RSX @550MHz

1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance

Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels

Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines

Sound: Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell-base processing)

Memory: 

256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz

256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz

[Playstation.About.com]

The chief aspects of the PlayStation 3 are the ground-breaking new microprocessor, the powerful graphics processor that supports High-Definition graphics at unprecedented resolutions and the console's controller makeover, among other things. Sony designed the PlayStation 3 to be more than just a video game ...

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