Technofile: Sony never intended its brand new PlayStation Portable to carry pornography, writes Mike Butcher.
But this week it had to face the prospect of a firm marketing an add-on which would do just this. It seems little can stop the rising tide of DIY hacking associated with gadgets like the PSP.
A Sony executive called the recently-announced GLAY'z PSP Porn "utterly undesirable", saying the company was powerless to stop its production. The Japanese porn will be printed on Universal Media Disks, common to the PSP. But this is a sideshow. Ordinary movies are starting to turn up on the PSP as well, downloaded from file-sharing networks, compressed and loaded onto PSPs for the owner's train journey into work.
The hack is not for the faint-hearted, but it is easily followed. For instance, when you format a Memory Stick Duo or Pro Duo stick in your PSP, you will get a new PSP folder, with sub-folders for "game", "music," "photos," and "save data". But nothing for videos. To achieve this, you need to put MPEG-4 video files in the main root directory of the Memory Stick.
To achieve the video, you need to download a free piece of software to convert videos into MP4. It's fiddly, but it can be done.
The are a lot more "home brew" hacks for the PSP. A wireless console which can play music as well as video games is a rich device for hackers. Tools for web browsing and online chat were among the first to appear since the console launched in the US and Japan this year. Other hacks include a way to view comics downloaded from the internet.
A web browser built into the racing game Wipeout Pure, which was meant to go to a Sony site, has been hacked so that the browser can be pointed to any internet site. None of this has been sanctioned by Sony, although it is rarely commented on. The world over, gadget-makers continue to forget how basic the human desire is to personalise the technology we use. It is rare now to find a teenager with a mobile phone which doesn't have a different ringtone or screensaver from the one the manufacturer intended.
Hacking physical gadgets has become something of a culture in its own right and one of the best known relates to iPod. It only took four days for the first iPod hacks site to go live after Apple launched it in 2001. Since then hacks have been produced at a prodigious rate, becoming more diverse as the range of iPods has grown.
For instance, Apple cripples recording on an iPod so that it can avoid hot legal water and accessories-makers can sell add-on devices for recording.
But hackers have found a way of installing the Linux operating system onto iPods to circumvent this. Another piece of software, iTunes, can be used to move music from the iPod onto other Macs, something Apple itself doesn't allow. It's also possible to synchronise your iPod with your desktop calendar and download all your contacts to it. Perhaps the best known of all "hacks" are the physical ones.
Enthusiasts have so far installed the diminutive iPod shuffle into a tiny sweet tin and a Tic-Tac case. But be warned, disassembling an iPod Shuffle can be quite tricky. And, it goes without saying that anyone who opens up an iPod, PSP or anything else for that matter will void the warranty.
Besides that, happy hacking!
