You might have already heard that in August Australian team created a first jailbreak for PS3 and released a commercial USB dongle PSJailbreak, which allows backing up games to HDD and running them. Also running any unsigned 3-rd party homebrew applications becomes a reality. Sony immediately tried to ban it from selling, but not very successfully.

Yesterday first open-source version of the jailbreak was released under the name PSGroove.

Now anyone can buy a USB dongle or USB board based on one of the Atmel chips (AT90USB162, AT90USB646, AT90USB647, AT90USB1286, AT90USB1287, ATMEGA32U4)  like Teensy 1.0, Teensy++ 1.0, Teensy 2.0, Teensy++ 2.0, AVR-USB162, install compiled PSGroove on it and there it goes.

All that does not mean of course that you can start backing up all of your games on HDD or using pirated versions. The software is still fresh, only FAT32 is supported (read - no backups for games over 4GB), it needs to be enabled in some awkward way (hard reset of the console). And you need to have some technical skills to reprogram a USB dongle.

Still the fact that it was made possible changes the rules of the game.

XBox and Wii have been there for a long time.

Now we welcome Sony to the war.