Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. (SCEI) has been thus far relatively successful at preventing pesky hackers from gaining full access to its PS3, opening the door to piracy, homebrews, and heavy modding.  Those happy days for SCEI may soon be at an end, though.

A team of German hackers called fail0verflow (Twitter, the group is currently building a webpage) developed a hack to calculate the super-secret security keys that the PS3 uses to determine if an application is legitimate or not.  The "epic PS3 security bypass" opens the door to just about everything ambitious console hackers ever dreamed of, software-wise.

As the hack makes use [video] of a smartphone, like an iPhone or Android phone, iPhone expert hacker Geohot (real name George Hotz) became involved and has officially released a polished version of the exploit.

He writes:

props to fail0verflow for the asymmetric half
no donate link, just use this info wisely
i do not condone piracy

if you want your next console to be secure, get in touch with me. any of you 3.
it'd be fun to be on the other side.

...and this is a real self, hello world
although it's not NPDRM, so it won't run off the hard drive
shouts to the guys who did PSL1GHT
without you, I couldn't release this

The Xbox 360's DRM protections were cracked some time ago.  Microsoft has worked to ban modded consoles from online play, though, so don't be surprise if SCEI resorts to similar measures.