It isn’t all that long since ‘hackers’ and certian parts of the PlayStation 3 community were rejoicing at the ability of devices such as PSFreedom, PSGroove, PSJailbreak to allow homebrew games from an external hard drive. Well, Sony have stepped in to dampen the spirits of those hoping for a PS3 that could eventually play their ‘back ups’ or pirated copies of games by releasing a firmware update for the PlayStation 3 that stops such devices in their tracks.

Exophase has confirmed that “all variants of the USB-hub emulating exploit (PSFreedom, PSGroove, PSJailbreak) are no longer functional”.

Sony themselves aren’t saying much except to confirm on their official blog that firmware update 3.42 “includes additional security features”.  Time will tell if this update will really be enough to stop piracy on the PS3, hackers don’t give up that easily.

via techradar

If you couldn’t wait for the Gold Edition of Resident Evil 5 to come out, which came out several months after the original, you’ll be out of luck if you were hoping to try the game with the upcoming Move. Sony have confirmed that only the Gold Edition will be able to support Move and a patch will be released through PSN near the time of the launch for the PlayStation Move. All Gold Editions of the game released after Move will come with support included on the disc. So if you were looking to try the game with Move, nows the time to try and trade the standard version in for the Gold version.

Sony have revealed that the 3D Blu-ray update, allowing playback of 3D Blu-ray movies, for the PlayStation 3 console should be available at some point in September. The release was originally dated as available “in the fall” of this year. There will also be a further update to come after that to add compatibility for 3D photographs on the PS3.

SCEE are keen to add 3D gaming to the PlayStation format as soon as they can because they see the gaming side of 3D as the front runner in the 3D revolution. As SCEE director Mick Hocking announced “We think games are going to be the killer content for 3D. In general, we find that 3D enhances all types of games. There are no types that it doesn’t bring a benefit to. We think the games this year are going to do the same [as Avatar did for movies] for the gaming community”.

Four gaming titles have been released already on the PSN that support the upcoming 3D technology – Wipeout, Motorstorm (demo), Super Stardust and PAIN and there are more to come including top titles such as Killzone 3 and Gran Turismo 5.

The full interview with CVG shows that Sony are taking 3D technology very seriously and the future of 3D in their hands is very exciting indeed!

Yet again, Sony are to change the hard drive specifications of it’s PlayStation 3. The PS3 Slim is currently available with a 120GB hard drive or a 250GB hard drive and is only available in black. From July 29th onwards the PS3 Slim will be available with either a 160GB or 250GB hard drive, which should retail for $340 and $400 respectively. From then, the PS3 Slim will also be available in Classic White, as well as the current black. Unfortunately this will only be available in Japan but, hopefully Sony will reveal their plans for North America and PAL regions soon.

As promised, Sony have released the 3.40 firmware update for the PlayStation 3. As well as adding support for the recently released PSN+ service, the update adds a Photo Gallery and a Video Editor and Uploader. The Photo Gallery allows you to browse photos found on Facebook or Picasa Web Albums. You can then share the photos with friends on the PlayStation Network. While the Video Editor, can be found through the XMB. You can edit your videos and save them. You also have the ability to upload the videos so other users can download them. There’s also a “five star rating” for videos, so you know which videos others have found most enjoyable. So far, there also hasn’t been any issues raised with the latest firmware.

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