I think its fair for Sony to assume that all its customers are potential pirates and take preventative measures to obstruct them.

The YLOD is actually the PS3 detecting your thoughts of piracy and commiting suicide.

Ps3 has this feature already. Most games don't take advantage of it though.

IMO this is a good thing. More like a PlayStation, not a media center with tons of extras.

If it's the big issue some are indignantly proclaiming it to be, here's what you do: snap up all the old PS3 units you can afford (most being used since they've been out of production for months) and use Linux on your PS3 cluster or collection of PS3s (if don't have the technical knowledge to build a cluster) to your heart's content.

Barring the Air Force and organizations using the PS3 for research purposes, I'd guess that about zero people will be doing this.

From a legal standpoint, a ToS is drafted by a company's team of attorneys who specialize in legal documents and agreements and will typically be airtight. Any major corporation or business will do this. They're not written by a bunch of game and hardware developers sitting in a conference room throwing in random suggestions to add to the document ("if the user agrees, SCE is entitled to the first slice of every pie containing rhubarb that said user purchases").

You can still use Linux, you just won't be entitled to any further update services as the previous firmware will no longer be supported.

US airforce have for sure custom PS3 without playstation OS... they surely have all ps3 with a special cluster software and have none of sony software in them, not even the firmware...

Yeah It woulda gone down so much better if they said 'Sorry we had to remove other OS support to fit... BACKWARDS COMPATABILITY!!! onto the firmware'. 

freaking pathetic move from Sony. Can't say how disappointed I am.

I dont get why it says 3.21, when we havent even hit 3.2 yet. Im sure its some sort of typo, but with the date and wrong firmware count up, who knows.

I am completely against including a feature then taking it out. I mean, everything you said makes perfect sense. I can't see it improving game performance, but I'll give you the benifit of the doubt.

The slim never had the other OS feature so you never saw me complaining there. But right now they are actually going to remove a feature that they used to advertise. My PS3 is a backwards compatible 60 gig. To me, this is almost the same as removing backwards compatibility. I never complained when they did it to the newer models...but if they came out and said they were taking the feature out of mine, I'd be hella pissed.

Sony's not to blame for this, only 1 man, Geohot. So since you have so much anger about this then throw it at Geohot not Sony, there just protecting there console, there big money maker is the software without that they could be in trouble. It's ALL Geohot's fault.

This is kind of like if I opened a store and someone found out how to steal food from my store and told everyone then everyone started stealing more food from me. So then I figure out a way to make it impossible for them to steal food and then people get pissed off at me...makes no sense right?

I got two theories about this announcement. It could be an April fools joke but maybe Sony wants to see the reaction from everyone first to see if they should implement this, if they get a lot of negative reactions then they can just say it's an April fool joke.