More than three years after it first launched, Sony’s PlayStation 3 has been hacked for the first time. The hacker? George Hotz, the chap who first hacked the iPhone 2G.

What does Hotz’s achievement mean, in real terms? Well, it’s pretty damn significant: we’re talking widespread piracy of PS3 games for the first time, and a dramatic increase in cheaters in online games. Yarr! And also: Ugh! Over at his blog, Hotz confirmed:

“I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3.”

Defenders of Hotz will argue that this opens the door for perfectly legal homebrew on the PS3, and while I’m all for that (having dipped my toe in homebrew on other consoles), let’s face facts: this is going to end up in mass piracy, and that’s predominantly A Bad Thing. According to Hotz, Sony did its best to ward off hackers:

“3 years, 2 months, 11 days…thats a pretty secure system. Took 5 weeks [...] very simple hardware cleverly applied, and some not so simple software.”

Hotz isn’t revealing the fine details of his exploit, for fear that Sony will simply release a patch correcting the hack.

[George Hotz, via Gizmodo]