A few months ago PS Jailbreak, a first Jailbreak USB dongle is launched, which allows users to play video games installed on their PS3 game console with or without hard drive.

Later, Sony sued the PS Jailbreak to make it illegal in Australia, Canada, and USA and even in Spain. Sony also updates PS3 firmware to 3.42 and 3.50 to blocks this exploit, with which gamers can’t run the PS Jailbreak as well as Other PS3 hacking program.

But the hackers never stop. Now, they hit back with the updated PS Downgrade USB dongle, which allows users to downgrade their firmware to an earlier version in order to achieve jailbreaking PS3 successfully.

This indicates that gamers who have upgraded their PS3 to firmware 3.42/3.50 are able to take full advantage of the PS Jailbreak’s features now. Additionally, the PS Downgrade does not modify your PS3 and you can update to the latest firmware anytime, showing that gamers can be able to change between any firmware version to meet their needs theoretically, enabling both online play and homebrews on the same PS3.

Certainly, the ability to downgrade your PS3 firmware is paid for a price until an open source solution appears. The PS Downgrade costs and is only available for one-time use, meaning you cannot use it downgrade your PS3 firmware more than once. Plus, “PS Downgrade is ONLY compatible with original PS Jailbreak, no clones or inferior USB dongles.” If you don’t own the PS Jailbreak yet, the combo set of PS Jailbreak and PS downgrade will cost 5. The PS Jailbreak is 0 by itself, so there is a bit of a discount for both. Keep in mind, either PS Downgrade or PS Jailbreak may void your warranty or brick your PS3 game console, so use them at your own responsibility.

However, additional PS Downgrade files have been leaked via an anonymous source on IRC on Nov 16, and a free version of PS Downgrade is well on its way to becoming a truth according to PS3News.com report. However, the previously leaked FLA file is still encrypted. Reverse engineer is needed to make an open solution. From the PS3 news website:

“Currently work is being done towards a free public PS3 downgrader alternative to the pay version, and based on a preliminary examination of the leaked PS Downgrader 3.41 PUP and Lv2diag.self files they appear to include a modified PUP along with the official Sony Playstation 3 Jig Files that were also leaked nearly two years ago.

Usually JIG files use a special PUP to downgrade as inside its CORE_OS package is flagged for downgrading, however, this is not the case. It seems that the PUP has been modified to allow downgrading, perhaps via another yet undisclosed exploit… Time will tell for sure!”

Sony is sure to fight against this PS3 jailbreak. Sony would very well launch some sort of counter-strike within days to somehow detect the use of the device; let’s wait for the further development.