Great!!!

Nice play on words =)

OT, If this is an April fool's joke, maybe they felt it better to lie that it's not an April fool's joke.

If it is an April fools joke it is a very poor one.

This is a very serious issue for Sony, the threat of piracy is looming and with the losses they have made on Hardware they need software sales to balance the books. If the system were to be hacked and pirated games to become available, then the damage it could do to the division could be huge.

A shame though, since I like Linux, and i think they'll give Microsoft and Apple a run for their money in the future, and that will benefit all of us.

Is there a reason your attacking me? I don't ever recall pissing you off

I'm wondering: what if another feature gets hacked? Will it be removed too?

The greatest iPhone hacker is working on the PS3.

I can see him alone being the reason they shut this down. To give you an example of his skill, he has been out of the game for a while on the iPhone side of things. The best the rest of the world could come up with for a jailbreak to the latest iPhone, was tethered (meaning if you had to reboot the iPhone, you had to plug the phone back into your computer to jailbreak it again).

This guy decided to take a look at it, and what the world could not do in months, he solved in two days. He is good.... very good. he goes by the name of Geohot.

George Hotz.  He's a bit of a pretentious douche, but he is very good at hacking hardware.

The thing I don't get is that the other OS feature is barely related to modding a PS3, and those that are intending to mod their ps3 simply wont update.  I don't see any reasonable purpose to removing this feature when they could just as easily enact a system that detects modded ps3's and disables their PSN remotely. This is assuming that they eventually work around the issues of not having access to the unique system keys and are able to produce a mod chip.

This Firmware update is akin to amputating the leg due to an ingrown toenail.

for all we know this might not be in direct response to GeoHotz adventures in PS3 land, it might be another flaw/weak point entirely that their own research uncovered.
It might not even be related to Linux, the entire Other OS preparation process itself might have been flawed
example; maybe they uncovered a way that the PS3 could be forced to dump it's encryption keys to the partition not run by the OS through the PS3 recovery mode or diagnostic software tool or something.

They should take the printer and photo galary features out while they at it cause I don't use them.

Oh god.... lets not go there hey.  There really was no point to the otheros feature, no one really took advantage of it so if sony has discovered that it could be used as an exploit for hackers then i have no problem.  In fact this news means nothing to me at all anyway, i don't understand the big deal.  Honestly how many of you out there actually had linux installed AND where using it on your ps3?