Playstation 3 Used by Feds to Bust Pedophiles

Federal officials have been buying up the old-style PS3 (the fat ones) and loading up Linux on them because they’re highly effective at cracking passwords on confiscated computer equipment from alleged pedophiles. They say there’s no after-hours Street Fighter 4 going on though because there are no controllers attached. Riiiight.

"Bad guys are encrypting their stuff now, so we need a methodology of hacking on that to try to break passwords," Claude E. Davenport, an agent in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, told the Scripps reporter. "The Playstation 3 -- its processing component -- is perfect for large-scale library attacks."

I'm gonna let you finish, but Chrome OS is the best linux distro, THE BEST LINUX DISTRO!

I mean, this is just silly, don't these people have racks and racks and floors upon floors of computer servers built to crack codes; isn't the NSA supposed to be handling this? I would think the immigration & customs would call NSA and ask them "we got a code to crack", "ok send it over"... 10 seconds later "ok it's cracked."

I thought the patriot act was supposed to get these government agencies to work together, not come up with MacGyveresq ideas to fend for themselves.

Originally Posted by Terry Olaes

They say there’s no after-hours Street Fighter 4 going on though because there are no controllers attached.

They don't need to be attached. All PS3 controllers use Bluetooth.

Shhh, they are bailing out Sony secretly.

This idea gets the..........

If someone uses a massive (at least 26 characters) alpha-numeric pass phrase, all of the PS3s on earth together wouldn't be able to crack it (well, at least before our sun expands into a red giant). The NSA itself can't defeat True Crypt, as long as it is protected by a strong pass phrase. It is nice to see PS3s being used for something useful though. This will only catch the asshole pedos who are smart enough to use encryption but too stupid to use a strong password.

Out of the billions of tax dollars that make up the budgets of these agency's and they buy used ps3's to crack encryption? Words can't express my amazement at the stupidity of all this.

this should be a PS3 ad. Hehe, it truly does EVERYTHING

Originally Posted by bacon

Out of the billions of tax dollars that make up the budgets of these agency's and they buy used ps3's to crack encryption? Words can't express my amazement at the stupidity of all this.

It's stupid to use the most cost-effective method or buy the cheapest FLOPS/$ machine?

It's our Government working at it most efficient best. Make a huge bureaucracy so they can communicate better. When they don't just spend more money.

Originally Posted by quixotic

It's stupid to use the most cost-effective method or buy the cheapest FLOPS/$ machine?

It is when there are rooms upon rooms of processing power available but under another agency's control.

Really PS3s? I mean used ones on top of that? Sounds fishy to me... they're not spending millions on a dedicated custom computer cluster jobby or anything? Please tell me they're at least paying 10x the price of a new one for each old one or I'll lose faith in the government!

Originally Posted by bacon

It is when there are rooms upon rooms of processing power available but under another agency's control.

There are rooms of processing power in many research institutions too... however just like the NSA most likely it's got a pretty large workload all the time. Cracking passwords on potential pedophiles computers probably is a bit low on the usage scale.

Originally Posted by bacon

Out of the billions of tax dollars that make up the budgets of these agency's and they buy used ps3's to crack encryption? Words can't express my amazement at the stupidity of all this.

Why not? It's small, fairly cheap and they say its architecture is suited for these types of operations...
While general purpose x86 processors are great for some things, other architectures have their own strengths and weaknesses. Look at Fermi for another example of gaming technology that is being adapted for other purposes...

Apparently some people here aren't aware of how powerful the cell processors in the PS3 are. Using a PS3 to help crack passwords is much faster than a standard pc because of the massive parallelism it enables. The feds using this is a direct result of research conducted in 2007; http://www.pcworld.com/article/14006...passwords.html

Heck, for all we know we may be cracking passwords via the DC projects we're so fond off... I mean really, how do you KNOW you're doing protein folding simulations?

Originally Posted by RamonGTP

Heck, for all we know we may be cracking passwords via the DC projects we're so fond off... I mean really, how do you KNOW you're doing protein folding simulations?

Great point. I am glad that I am not the only person thinking the same thing...

Everybody knows if they don't buy games they're actually costing Sony money.

Omg, I know so much more than the Feds +eleventy billion!

If they were smart enough to encrypt it they should have used an encryption that once cracked leaves them access to garbage files or something that looks innocent.

To the guy who asked about the NSA; They have better things to do.