Sony has today pushed out version 3.55 of their PlayStation 3 firmware. Calling it a “minor” update that adds a “security patch”, the update has no changelog on the dashboard, and the entirety of Sony’s blog post on the subject is half as long as this sentence. The update is mandatory; users cannot connect to the PlayStation Network until they’re patched and up to date.
The update is obviously to patch around updates made to PSJailbreak, which include the recently released PS Downgrade, which lets homebrewers downgrade to older firmwares to either play unauthorized games or revert back to 3.12, the last firmware that supported Other OS/Linux installations.
This completely pointless update that affects maybe .01% of the world’s userbase took me exactly eight minutes and fifty four seconds from initial download to reboot. What bothers me is that Sony isn’t being upfront about what’s going on; regular users weren’t told anything in a changelog (bigger updates are filled with changes, Sony’s way of saying “hey, look at what we’re doing!”), and they’re not even admitting there was an issue in the first place. If the process were less annoying, it wouldn’t be a problem, but the process of patching a firmware involves loading in a completely new one every single time, and pre-loading of downloads – something that should have been bog standard in the first place – is a “perk” to the paid PlayStation Plus programme.
With the homebrew and hacking scene more involved, and PSJailbreak being open source, look forward to wasting more time in the future.
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