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A comment on Indie Game Removed from Switch After Dev Reveals It Has a Hidden Code Editor. Parent comment

Re:Indie Game Removed from Switch After Dev Reveals It Has a... by eridius on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @02:51AM (#19785691)
OtherOS was officially removed due to security concerns. I'm not sure how to find this offhand but my recollection is that OtherOS was used to facilitate jailbreaking the system. Its function wasn't to prevent jailbreaks but to get people interested in programming for the Cell processor.
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Re:Indie Game Removed from Switch After Dev Reveals It Has a... by aepiepaey on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @09:51AM (#19787903)
A significant portion of the skilled hardware hackers cracking consoles do it because they care about homebrew, but they dislike piracy.

By providing something like OtherOS, you remove the incentive for that group to crack your console.

It is fairly telling that the PS3 was only cracked after OtherOS was removed.

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Re:Indie Game Removed from Switch After Dev Reveals It Has a... by eridius on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @01:49PM (#19790217)
A news article talking about George Hotz's original PS3 hack was released January 25, 2010. The PS3 software update that removed OtherOS was released April 1, 2010.

As I recall, ultimately Hotz managed to compromise the device's root key, and Sony determined that it was impossible to protect the key (after replacing it) as long as OtherOS continued to exist.

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