Good news for Sony! Those recent PS3 prices cuts are finally starting to pay off as sales of the floundering console more than tripled during the first official week of the holiday shopping season. Thankfully, that doesn't mean researchers have stopped coming up with creative new uses (i.e., non-gaming and Blu-ray viewing) for the console.
Wired News recently chronicled the PS3's ongoing role in searching for elusive gravity waves spewing from massive black holes. And now comes word of yet another extracurricular project dubbed 'Crackstation.'
Nick Breese, a senior security consultant in Australia, has apparently found a way to use the PS3 for hacking passwords. Like Dartmouth's Dr. Gaurav Khanna, Breese is finding that the console's Cell processor is particularly adept at doing all sorts of number simple crunching tasks -- precisely the kind you need to crack codes. The Cell even tends to outshine the multi-cored competition (Intel) when it comes to doing very simple things in a very quick manner, says Breese.
In fact, using his PS3, Breese effectively demonstrated that the capability of cracking encryption algorithms has multiplied by 100. Bad news maybe for security professionals, but good news for the PS3's growing research resume.
[Via PC World]
Photo: Flickr/Darren Waters
