If I know anything about those communities, they sit on a bag of zero days and another bag of leads to zero days in the bootloader or whatever everjail they need to break out of.
I saw a post from someone who worked in the scene recently, seems they were someone famous. I don’t follow things so I’m not sure. Basically they were giving up because new people to the scene were just discovering things with AI and then immediately disclosing them to the world, allowing Sony to patch them before they really got used.
Sucks for the hoarder, but that is indeed how bug bounties are supposed to work. The first reporter gets the payout, disincentivizing sitting on valid vulns.
Unfortunately the goal here wasn't to get the bounty, it was to keep it out of the hands of Sony who'll patch it.
The issue, as I understood it in this case was that he wanted it kept quiet until GTA6 launches, because announcing it to the public also announces it to Sony, and they'll patch it; normally that's fine, everyone just doesn't update, but given GTA6 is apparently quite popular, my understanding is that he wanted to let everyone get that one last update that allows GTA6 to run before they're stuck on that version.
That was my sense. It takes time to figure out how to use a bug as an exploit.
So normally if the community found this stuff I guess they’d work together to make a jailbreak. Maybe they already were working on that with bug X but hadn’t told anyone.
The JoeClaudeUser posts publicly “Hey everyone I found bug X over here! I’m awesome!”.
Now it can’t be used because Sony will fix it. If they had already been using it behind closed doors all that work is flushed.
Muromec · · focus · HN ↗
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
It sounded like things may have changed.
Synthetic7346 · · focus · HN ↗
alias_neo · · focus · HN ↗
The issue, as I understood it in this case was that he wanted it kept quiet until GTA6 launches, because announcing it to the public also announces it to Sony, and they'll patch it; normally that's fine, everyone just doesn't update, but given GTA6 is apparently quite popular, my understanding is that he wanted to let everyone get that one last update that allows GTA6 to run before they're stuck on that version.
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
So normally if the community found this stuff I guess they’d work together to make a jailbreak. Maybe they already were working on that with bug X but hadn’t told anyone.
The JoeClaudeUser posts publicly “Hey everyone I found bug X over here! I’m awesome!”.
Now it can’t be used because Sony will fix it. If they had already been using it behind closed doors all that work is flushed.
alias_neo · · focus · HN ↗
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
mrheosuper · · focus · HN ↗
"PS5 running Linux" was hot news months ago.