Regardless of what Sony might want you to think, piracy is not the only reason that people want to hack their PS3 to run software that isn’t official. There are lots of folks out there that want to put some homebrew software on their PS3 just for fun and to allow them to do things that are cool and in no way have to do with pirating video games. Sony has a history of plugging up hacks as quickly as possible and the company has even went so far as to seek legal means to prevent hacks from being used on the console as it did with PSJailbreak in Spain.

The Chaos Communication Congress was held in Berlin recently and at the show a small hacker group called fail0verflow announced that they had been able to break the PS3 security in a massive way. Apparently, the group discovered how to calculate the security keys needed to sign off on any piece of software, which essentially makes the keys to the security gate for the PS3 public.

This is a far more effective hack than the PSJailbreak that Sony went after so fiercely. This new hack will let users run any software they want be it a pirated game burned to a Blu-ray disc or home brew software. Apparently, the hack works on any PS3 with any version of the firmware as well. Fail0verflow says that its goal with the hack was to allow Linux to be run on any PS3 in response to the loss of the install Other OS feature on older PS3s.