People still believe that this happens thanks to reverse-engineering?
Isn't it all that obvious that manufacturers simply want "piracy" to exist because this way they can earn a lot more ?
Just like consoles modchip... they are freely sold and used on all major consoles (and the PS3 will follow,either that or a modified firmware...) ... if they were so illegal, how comes they can get freely imported into countries and sold by shops? Why multinationals just don't do anything serious to stop them ?
Well, isn't it pretty obvious ? Selling CD/DVD and soon BD burners in large quantities as well as selling hundreds of millions of blank media ensures way higher profts than selling a few originals at high prices.. that's pretty obvious, isn't it ?
Also, all the fuss about DRM technologies ensures more money flowing thru industry agreements and such. And once the money got collected, the protective "anti-piracy" measures are no longer needed, so they ensure the obvious happens, they manage to give average Joe the needed tools to copy whatever he wants to and they will get huge profits thanks to that due to many more people buying burners, modchips, blank media than originals...
Does anyone really believe that, just for example, the PSP hacked firmwares that add tons of new features along with a PS1 emulator are coded by some amateurs that can't have access to the source code and all needed development tools and that would be able to decrypt and disassemble the code even in just a week to create an hacked version ?
This is all part of the pseudo-capitalistic viral marketing strategy that multinational marketing people pursue to ensure some large profits.
Do people seriously believe that 12-18 year old "hackers" can reverse engineer encrypted firmwares like nothing and without having seriously studied the architectures on official white papers and service/developer manuals ? (which isn't something you can download on the 'net.. believe it or not but the way expensive DVD White Paper specification document can't be downloaded from anywhere, you still have to buy it just like for the BD and HD-DVD ones...).