PSP piracy threat looms as hackers break protection
Hackers have succeeded in making the PlayStation Portable play pirated copies of four commercial games from the Memory Stick slot, in a worrying development that could lead to widespread piracy on the platform.
Amateur programming teams working on the PSP had already succeeded in making the machine run unauthorised code, and a large number of "homebrew" games and emulators for older systems are being circulated on the Internet.
It's only in recent days, though, that hackers have managed to make the PSP boot pirate copies of games - and now four titles, namely Mercury, Lumines, Coded Arms and Puzzle Bobble - can be downloaded from pirate sites and played off Memory Stick.
The exploit, which uses a bug in certain versions of the software that ships with the PSP to circumvent the machine's protection system, has already been addressed by Sony in more recent versions of the system software, and will almost certainly not work on European models when they arrive in September.
