afrothunder wrote:Um.. aren't they on KIRK itself?
Yes, but I meant where people found them originally. Finding them in the device itself and getting them from a separate product might be seen as different under law, so it's important not to mix that stuff up.
SifJar wrote:PSP doesn't use aesymetric encryption AFAIK (i.e. not public-private key)
You sure? By default the PSP expects encrypted programs, but with CFW you can run decrypted ones. In fact there's an option in the GEN firmware to run unencrypted software from the UMD drive (called "plain modules in UMD/ISO"), I've read this was for testing purposes and that when enabled it would not run official content (as it wouldn't decrypt it), but I don't have any UMDs myself to test right now. It's possible I'm just confusing something else for it though, I might ask FAST later.
But yes, as Wololo states there are laws for interoperability in various countries, and that includes the US, though I'll be damned if I can find the proper section, I'm not sure on the exact wording they used.
Strangelove wrote:As far as I know the DMCA makes breaking any kind of encryption illegal.
So it should be illegal in the US. But then again, I'm not a lawyer...
Unfortunately the DMCA
does make breaking encryption illegal (outside of specific cases the Librarian Of Congress is set to outline every so often, the latest being
here), however this is not breaking the encryption, we have the "master" keys (as much as I dislike that term), we can sign things the same way as Sony does.
This is an unprecedented event for modern systems (all other hacks bypass the need for signed programs instead), and it is a worst-case scenario for Sony, as they cannot simply stop people from doing it. They have no way to use the law to put a stop to people signing things, so instead they're going a roundabout way to try to make the act (of signing as well as having found the keys) out as one for pure copyright infringement purposes (which isn't going too well).