NOTE THIS HAS BEEN CRACKED SO NO NEED TO WORRIE George "Geohot" Hotz opened a Pandora's box by making the PS3 root key public, which made life easier for hackers to enable full-fledged homebrew and pirated games by throwing the system encryption open. And so they did with a custom firmware (CFW) v3.55 which allowed just that. Sony reacted predictably by first promising a patch[/URL] for the CFW and then with the mandatory lawsuit. Three weeks after PS3 was compromised, Sony has [released[/URL] a compulsory update that installs the new firmware v3.56 that kills the homebrew features of the v3.55 firmware. The update seems to be an exclusive security fix, which just might ease the woes of beleaguered Call of Duty: Modern Warfare players. PSX-Scene says that the v3.56 update packs in a new .SELF with an unknown KEY. The .SELF files are the executables in the PS3 system and this one fixes the compromised keys with a new one. That means all homebrew tools will need to be tweaked to function again. Youness Alaoui aka KaKaRoToS is busy cracking the latest firmware and you can watch his tweets for latest updates on the matter. If you're still confused, this update is mandatory if you want to use the PS3 online. However, it won't be long before this update is compromised as well.
Anything done now will simply be an attempt to keep people off the PSN with modified games for a couple of days, I would be surprised if Sony could put any major road blocks in hacking any of the PS3 and PSP's released to date.