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(credit: Sony)

If you see someone still playing on a PSP, chances are it's because it's been hacked to hell. Sony's trusty handheld might not have been the sales sensation the company had hoped for, but—despite its best efforts—the PSP became the handheld to own if you were into homebrew software or retro gaming thanks to the ease with which it was hacked, the quality of the hardware, and a steady stream of unofficial software and emulators.

There was hope that the follow up to the PSP, the PlayStation Vita, would be similarly hacked, the improved hardware and additional analogue stick allowing for the emulation of more sophisticated consoles. Unfortunately, the Vita has been a much tougher nut to crack. Despite some early efforts, the best anyone had come up with was an exploit that only worked on an older version of the Vita firmware, and that required it to be tethered to a PC—hardly ideal for a portable console.

Fortunately, some clever folks at the hacking collective Team Molecule have come up with a solution that fully unlocks the Vita hardware for homebrew developers. Dubbed HENkaku, the jailbreak exploit not only works on the latest 3.60 Vita firmware, it requires very little user intervention to execute. All you have to do is head over to the official HENkaku website on the Vita, tap on the install button, and then sit back and let the hack work its magic. The one drawback is that the jailbreak isn't permanent, so if the Vita is fully powered off it needs to be reinstalled.

(credit: YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images)

Despite the popularity of Pokémon Go, the game is flaky at best. Numerous bugs and glitches not only make it difficult to find Pokémon—giving rise to Pokemon tracking sites like PokéVision—but also to play the game without it crashing periodically. Fortunately, developer Niantic has pushed out the first major update to Pokémon Go, one that promises to nix several of the smaller, more irritating bugs, as well as remove features that were causing players issues.

The most surprising change—particularly since Niantic has been trying to shut down sites like PokéVision—is the removal of the footprint feature, which was supposed to help players find pokémon by displaying a set of paw prints in the nearby pokémon tracker. Unfortunately, the feature never worked, and rather than hack a fix together, Niantic has pulled it completely. Whether it makes a return or not Niantic isn't saying, but hopefully something comes along to replace it: currently the only way to find pokémon is through blind luck, or word of mouth.

Indeed, numerous players took to Twitter and Reddit over the weekend to express their frustration with Niantic removing the three steps feature and shutting down Pokémon Go tracking sites, leaving them with no way of accurately tracking down the pokémon they need. That said, while PokéVision has been shut down, the similar Trackémon website is still up and showing the real-time location of Pokémon.

Enlarge (credit: Presidential Press and Information Office)

Russia's intelligence agency the FSB, successor to the KGB, has posted a notice on its website claiming that it now has the ability to collect crypto keys for Internet services that use encryption. This meets a two-week deadline given by Vladimir Putin to the FSB to develop such a capability. However, no details have been provided of how the FSB is able to do this.

The FSB's announcement follows the passage of Russia's wide-ranging surveillance law, which calls for metadata and content to be stored for six months, plus access to encrypted services, as Ars reported back in June.

The new capability seems to go even further, since the FSB notice (in Russian) speaks of obtaining the "information necessary for decoding the electronic messaging received, sent, delivered, and (or) processed by users of the 'Internet' network."