Our hopes have been dashed to the rocks once again. News a few days ago about a retail PS3 unit's HDD getting decrypted sure made quite a stir, but apparently, we've been hoodwinked. It's nothing but an epic fake!

Thanks to emaster101 for giving us a heads up on this!

Fans managed to hack the Japanese demo of Resident Evil 5, revealing what may be a clue to Jill Valentine's role in the game. We'll tag it rumor for now, but if you don't like possible spoilers, better not go to the full article for details.

Bet you want to. Click.

We've just gotten a report that hackers have successfully decrypted PlayStation Home beta 0.86. With these sensitive files laid bare to the public (or, at least, laid bare to the hacking public), current online speculation holds that Home might be delayed due to this incident. Wow. All this talk of delay... if it's not because of offensive lyrics in a song, it's hackers. What next?

This we credit to QJ.NET Forums moderator FreePlay for pointing out while I drowned in DirectX dreams. It appears that Alek and Mathieulh, reputable personalities of the PSP homebrew scene, have figured out how backup games can be run on the PlayStation 3. And since the new development restarted the whispers of PS3 ISO loaders and what-have-yous five hours ago, moderator FreePlay managed to figure out how it could be accomplished.

(Editor's Note: From highs and lows, and everything in between, QuickPeek 37 is going to hit you hard - and it's going to hit you good.)

Time to grab your trusty QuickPeek walking stick, because there's lots and lots of catching up to do. The gaming industry's taken the high road, and that's our cue to help you guys out. Time for the weekly roll call of the hottest items that dropped in during the past seven days! It's one heck of a landslide, folks!

Not long after Segher and Brushing demonstrated a savegame exploit on the Nintendo Wii, Team ICE came forward with an exploit of their own for the Sony PlayStation 3. Yet again it involves a .TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) file, but this time it invokes a specific error in the heap data area of Sony's next generation console. More information at the full story.

This week's list of Blu-ray releases will have you either at the edge of your seats or sitting comfortably on your couches sipping cider. We've got action from Die Hard's John McClane and Pathfinder's Ghost. We also have some holiday fun from Santa Claus and Jack Frost, plus some Hairspray to complete the list.

Check out the full article for the complete list of Blu-ray releases.

Frank Yu, former Casual Games Producer for Microsoft in China, recently gave a report on the state of piracy in China following the Hong Kong raid where authorities seized 10,000 mod chips for Nintendo consoles. The last major news of piracy in China was last year; at that time it was for the Xbox 360.

Remember our report about Xbox 360 and Wii piracy in the Philippines? Turns out piracy is popular for both the Xbox 360 and the Wii in China as well.

According to Yu though, there isn't much demand for the PlayStation 3 so there's no modding or any distribution of pirated games in China that he is aware of and he doesn't even mention the PSP, which is a popular victim in many other areas. The Nintendo DS isn't spared however, as the Supercard (R4 card) is being sold in China.

Yu states that the Japanese Wii is a more popular candidate for modding since the US Wii has more protection. Modded Wiis can still download firmware although some of the more recent games, like Metroid Prime 3: Corruption won't work (although Yu believes this won't be true for long).

As for the Xbox 360, piracy is still very much active and rampant in the country. While Xbox 360 consoles in China will still be shut out of Xbox Live when MS detects that the console is modded, Yu has heard of a rumor that talks of a mod chip you can switch on and off. One just has to turn it off to log on to Xbox Live.

Hacking and modding is rampant but also incredible efficient - so much that the "folks at MS are always impressed by the speed and workaround that hackers and modders do to the motherboard." Hacking in China is also popular with foreigners, who aren't strangers with hacking shops at all.

  

Hackers have finally found their way through the PS3's front defenses - firmware versions 1.10 and 1.11 can now be allowed to boot game copies, but they won't play just yet. Homebrews are currently out of the scene too, which basically means tinkering with your unit right now will only break warranty.

However, Sony was quick on the trigger, immediately giving their word after the news broke out. Spokesperson Dave Karakker told Games Industry:

Unfortunately, hackers will try to exploit any hardware system software. The best we can do as a company is to make our security that much stronger and aggressively pursue legal action against anyone caught trying to use an exploit in an illegal manner.

Props to Sony for making a lot of their faithful followers happy, since a lot of PS3 owners expressed their concerns regarding the matter. This statement should give fans a little peace of mind. We don't see hackers giving up in the near future though; these modern Robin Hoods would stop at nothing to make free games available.

Microsoft recently admitted to being a victim of hacking through social engineering. Social engineering is defined as "a collection of techniques used to manipulate people into performing actions or divulging confidential information" (Wikipedia). The company's phone support staff released the account details of some Xbox Live users to some callers. As a result, some users were charged with purchases they did not make.

Security experts from Australia believe that this is not an isolated case. Gamers are being warned that they are one of the new high profile targets this year. MacLeonard Starkey, a security analyst for Australia's Computer Emergency Response Team (Auscert), said, "I haven't seen [sic] any malicious code that is specifically designed to run on a PlayStation 3 or an Xbox but I would expect (it) is not very far away at all."

He further elaborated on this, citing the attacks on MMORPG gamers. "We're seeing an awful lot of malicious code that will specifically target online games for the purposes of capturing user names and passwords." He stressed the financial ramifications of the incidents saying that these "thieves" can log in and steal the items collected by the players over a course of time. "There's actually some pretty good money in that," he added.
 
However, not everyone sees the threat as inherently malicious. The director of product management at security software maker CA 1, Stefana Muller, believes that the attacks on gaming payment systems and less damaging "proof-of-concept" hacks will be done to show off a hackers proficiency than for monetary gain.

She gave her take on the matter. "I think it's going to be an 'I did it' kind of target, 'I got to exploit this gaming console'. It's obvious that once a new thing comes out, if it's cool, it will be exploited."