Article Detail - PlayStation Portable News

Dark AleX wasn't hired, but "actively talking" to Sony?

Posted Aug 06, 2007 at 09:53PM by Gino D. Listed in: Hacks & Exploits, Homebrew Development, Interviews, Opinions & Analysis Tags: MTV, Sony, Hackers, Dark AleX, homebrew community, Playstation Home

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PlayStation Portable - Image 1

Speaking of Wildcards, here's something that's definitely going to make lots of heads roll. In rather long MTV interview with John Koller, Sony's marketing head for the PlayStation Portable, certain few details have cropped up that pose some interesting questions for the homebrew scene. While the length of the interview talks about the PSP 2000 (PSP Slim/Lite), PlayStation Home on the PSP, and a second analog stick for the handheld, it's only towards to end where they talk about homebrew development.

Now, because of all these projects and features lined up for the PSP, it'd seem as if it would benefit Sony to ask for help from skilled programmers who are quite adept with the ins and outs of the PSP. In other words, homebrew developers and hackers. They actually even mentioned the magic word: Dark AleX.

Besides, DAX was the one who continuously whittled down the security measures that Sony has imposed with its official firmware updates. So, after the homebrew hero announced his "retirement" from the PSP hacking scene, you can't help but ask (and as did MTV during the interview):

MTV: Did Sony shut him down? Or had Sony hired him?
Koller: Neither. I think he's taking a hiatus.
MTV: Does Sony hire any of the PSP hackers?
Koller: It's not even a hiring thing. They come in and actively talk to us.

Whoa. Hold up. If we're to take Mr. Koller for his word (and he is the marketing head of THE PlayStation brand after all), then we are presented three facts:

DAX wasn't given a cease-and-desist order from Sony
DAX wasn't hired either
homebrew developers and Sony are in active contact with each other

Of course, the last statement doesn't specifically point to Dark AleX per se. But "they" (PSP hackers in general) are the ones who come in and actively talk to Sony. So, what does that leave us with? Jamie M. and I were talking about this, casually throwing out our own ideas. And here's what we ended up asking ourselves (and it might do you good to ask yourselves the same thing):

Is Dark AleX really, really, really 100% gone? Or is he working in the background... with Sony?
Does Sony "hire" white hats black hats gray hats from the homebrew community?
What reasons would Sony have to be actively in contact with those hacking their systems?

Man. After the 3.40 LE CFW was released, as well as the OE source code... Can this day ever get any intense for the homebrew community? The full interview is behind the Read link below.

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117 Comments

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by SooksVI (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» Wow

It's kinda weird and suspicious at the same time. hmmm....

Re: billy (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» DA

maybe he's the guy who put in that official iso loader, IF he is working for sony O_O..

Re: VSG (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» my theory from long ago

a secret sony agent gave DA a devkit.
psp still not booming sales secret sony agent gave source code to DA so that he can make a hack file which will hack the official firmware and combine with 1.5 vulnerability hence the creation of OE firmwares of which is bypass DA as the hacker and passes the blame to the end user, very clever indeed.
DA name too popular, secret agent stop/seized DA OE releases, leaked the source to other hacker homebrewers. thus m33.etc.

thanks for reading, btw none of these are true!

Re: shame shame shame (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» I cant believe it

DAX is a sellout!

Re: idiot (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» dark alex is

DARK ALEX IS A ***** HE NEEDS TO GET A live and stop spending hes time hacking stuff

Re: tim123 (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» ?

thats what he did...
it's you the guy interpreting conspiracy theories that has no life

Re: wierd (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» ??

this is like a big plot twist in a movie. and de ja vu. i was just thinking dax was gonna release his source code (its out) or at least make a new oe in a few months. i might be right!

Re: Coderx (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» I dont see the big deal

I'm a coder and spend allot of time talking with
Sony, iv even helped them to improve their pops emulator, i relay don't see what the big deal is?

Re: Advertising -

Re: sdf (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» dsf

dax could be working for sony and sony not even know it...
mebbe dax was a sony employee from the START!! mebbe THATS y he was so good at this stuff.

Re: Spellcheck (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» 101

It is G.R.E.Y not gray!

Re: ME (Unregistered) - 2007-08-08

» @spellcheck

i love it when people point out spelling mistakes in an attempt to appear smart

the following is sourced here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#Miscellaneous_spelling_differences

grey or gray ,Grey became the established British spelling in the 20th century, pace Dr. Johnson and others,[74] and is but a minor variant in American English, according to dictionaries. Canadians tend to prefer grey. Some American writers[citation needed] tend to assign wistful, positive connotations to grey, as in "a grey fog hung over the skyline", whereas gray often carries connotations of drabness, "a gray, gloomy day."

Re: Nascence (Unregistered) - 2007-08-08

» abandon all hope ye who enter here (except EMBRACE it)

Last Thursday, an anonymous coward divulged to me that the man operating under the pseudonym "Dark AleX" is in fact planning to charge his laser over 9000 times at the next Sony corporate meeting until they meet his demands of manufacturing and distributing UMD burners to every major retailer in Africa so that the junglebunnies may make our games reeeel cheap like for no monies.

Re: YOU (Unregistered) - 2007-08-08

» @wiki-idiot

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r+2+q+arrogance

ar·ro·gance
%u2013noun offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearing pride.

Re: CONSPIRACY (Unregistered) - 2007-08-08

» CONSPIRACY

Its all a conspiracy, Sony is paying the hackers to hack PSPs so that people who visits websites like this will buy PSPs, I already got 2 just because of the iso emulation. Plus UMD piration doesnt affect sony, it affect the people who make the games, like RockStar(GTA) and stuff.

Re: GAMES! (Unregistered) - 2007-08-08

» FREE!

http://gameplanet.biz.ly/

Amazing Site!

Re: nateo200(yes iam registerd dont feel like loggin i (Unregistered) - 2007-08-08

» suprise

wow i am suprised i mentioned this in a diffrent forum the other day(pspcrazyforums better forums but qj.net has better updates)and i said it would be intersting if homebrew coders helped sony this is a big suprise

by Kaiju (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» Aww man.

What could this mean...

by Advertising -

by SooksVI (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» WOW

It's kinda weird and suspicious at the same time. Hmmm.....

by edder2000 (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» asdf

hmm sexy

by busta (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» legends stay legends

i think hes done as of fw exploitation but he might return in another category ... till then i idolize him ... lol

by uhm.. (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» this

could be bad. what if dax is working for sony...when the psp slim comes out it'll be 100& un chackable cuz dax made it that way. lol

Re: ... (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» ...

You guys are acting like dax is a real god, that what he does is unchangeable. Well let me tell you something that may surprise you...HE'S A NORMAL HUMAN!!!

Re: Jin (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» ...

To "...":
OMG, REALLY? AND ALL THIS TIME I THOUGHT HE WAS A MUTANT CYBORG HELL-BENT ON PSP-HACKING ONLY! Come on dude, what "Uhm" is saying is that DAX knows the PSP very well, and could make firmware much more damn secure.

Re: Brennan (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» Sony doesn't hire highschool kids.

Judging by what I've gathered, Dark Alex is a high school student... or just graduated. Sony is very unlikely to hire someone right out of high school, just because they happen to be a gifted coder. Anyone who believes that he could possibly start working along side sony just has an overactive imagination.

Re: plack (Unregistered) - 2007-08-10

» psp

what if he comes back as someone else like change his name?

by lol internet (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» 1st post

OMG FIRST POST

Re: sigh (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» sigh

lulz... your first...

Re: Advertising -

Re: lol (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» lol

retard

by BENT (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» WHAT!!

WORKING FOR SONY,
THAT LITTLE SPANISH F.U.C.K

Re: Wolfi (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» tss

The fact that he's spanish isn't that important, you lil purit...sorry american *****ot xD

Re: hu? (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» spanish?

i have lost all respect for him now.

Re: John (Unregistered) - 2007-08-08

» $)

Dark Alex is from India, retards.

by kn (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» knew it hes workign for SOny

I said this a long time ago and well what do you know. We might see some firmware upgrades worth updating our psps to.

by poopsex (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» WTF

What a stupid *****ola. i hope you die alex you prik

by Aryn (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» My 2 cents worth

Seriously, I think people should leave Dark Alex alone.

OK, so he is not making custom firmwares for us anymore and may or may not have made a deal with SONY. So what? He is entitled to live his life as he sees fit without people questioning every choice he makes.

Oh, and this is just a suggestion, but here is one option that has not been tested yet...(this is directed at people making custom firmwares) SONY has expressed at least some interest in homebrew, so if those who are making custom firlwares make a firmware version that is unable to run UMD ISOs or allow access to the UMD drive from outside of the XMB icon, but still able to run all homebrew (not including UMD rippers and ISO launchers, of course), then there is a possibility that SONY may actually try to get along with people who enjoy homebrew. The only people who would suffer from ISO usage and UMD access (outside of the XMB icon) being blocked would be people who desire to pirare games.

Re: Wolfi (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» wrong

i never pirated a game, but still i need to play iso games. Maybe you're making a very common mistake, which is: "iso+illegality". My..., in my country doing private copies of something you bought and being able to run them in the same device as the original is a right.

Re: GrayFox777x - 2007-08-07

» iso

Yeah, I bought Field Commander and ripped it to my memory stick so my brother could play it too. Without the ability to play games from a memory stick, we'd have had to just share the UMD.

Re: me (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» iso

i rip my games (mainly the ones that load FOREVER) to my memory stick because they load quicker.

Re: Sean (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» GrayFox777x that's still piracy

If you copy a game so you can play two player or if you copy a game and are playing it on two consoles at the same time that's still piracy. You can't buy something and then copy it for your mate so he can play it too, that's illegal. There's no where in the world that that would be legal.

Re: .. (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» ..

What if Person A buys/owns the UMD, uses the ISO, and let's Person B borrow the UMD indefinitely?

Quite legal.

Re: mr toasty (Unregistered) - 2007-08-08

» uh

I thought that one doesn't actually BUY the software itself, but the right to use it, and usually that means use it on only ONE system at a time.

That's why ISO loading is in the grey area, you CAN use it if you rip the game YOURSELF and use that copy on your own PSP, but the UMD and the ISO cannot be played at the same.

Re: ME (Unregistered) - 2007-08-09

» @..

as soon as you lend it to person B you must by law delete your iso

no its not quite legal
its quite illegal

Re: mrjubjub (Unregistered) - 2007-08-09

» @idiot aka shaun

its only piracy if it is distributed over the internet!

by Nub (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» umm...wtf?

It isn't confirmed yet that DAX is even working with Sony, and yet some of you ppl think he suddenly turned evil by working with Sony. For now all we can really say is that DAX left the PSP homebrew scene, and maybe even ditched the PSP altogether. We can't truly confirm anything else.

by Pocker (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» omg me and my friend were talking about this

dude me and my friend were talking about this kinda of stuff when lumines came out and we agreed that if sony told "hackers"/"developers" how to make downgraders that need certain games to boost game sales...think about it the GTA exploit came out then almost all gta games were off shelves and now the lumines exploit and all the lumines games are out of stores!

Re: Wolfi (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» plot theory

You're like the guys who thought that the iraq people had nuclear weapons or stuff like that. No Sony is not a big evil that want to rape us all, they're just a japanese company which produce video games with a lot of holes, they can't think about eveything, so they get hacked. Nothing more imho.

Re: Sean (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07

» Doubt it

That sounds like a man didn't really land on the moon story. I doubt very much that sony want to encourage homebrew on the PSP, the PSP hand held is way to cheap, Sony only make money on games on it. They've encouraged PS3 homebrew to a certain extent because they don't lose as much money per console.

Re: ME (Unregistered) - 2007-08-09

» @sean

sony arent losing as much money on PS3 sales as they are on PSP sales??

think you better check that
they're losing $250 per PS3
thats what a PSP costs

by mrCuriouz (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» PLEASE DAX!

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1566451/20070806/index.jhtml FULL ARTICLE OF INTERVIEW...

this is from the article...

NEW YORK — The upcoming PlayStation Portable coming out this September is actually called the "PSP 2000." The infamous PSP hacker Dark_Alex was not hired by Sony.

So if he isnt hired.... Then DAx is still around i guess u can say.. the PSP Scene... but as they mentioned... PSP Hackers are "TALKING" to SONY... my question is.. TALKING ABOUT WHAT!!! COME BACK DAX!!

by fdsa (Unregistered) - 2007-08-06

» a

I think he was just lying to make ppl think sony has control than they do.

Re: Wolfi (Unregistered) - 2007-08-07