From 4a516309368c08a89b30bf212121db6f9cc46bad Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Lucidiot Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2019 08:45:58 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] Document the Information Board, close #8 --- infoboard/country-select.dtd | 10 + infoboard/index.html | 589 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ infoboard/ps3-feed.dtd | 6 + 3 files changed, 605 insertions(+) create mode 100644 infoboard/country-select.dtd create mode 100644 infoboard/index.html create mode 100644 infoboard/ps3-feed.dtd diff --git a/infoboard/country-select.dtd b/infoboard/country-select.dtd new file mode 100644 index 0000000..82ab77a --- /dev/null +++ b/infoboard/country-select.dtd @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/infoboard/index.html b/infoboard/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c5dff38 --- /dev/null +++ b/infoboard/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,589 @@ + + + + the psn's information board + + + + + + + + +

the psn's information board

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main project page

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contents

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introduction

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The PlayStation Network's Information Board was the built-in news feed available alongside the PlayStation Store on PSP and PS3. While scrolling through every icon in my PSP's XMB

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Using a squid proxy, I managed to get logs of my PSP's HTTP requests, allowing me to have a look at what's hidden behind the information board. I expected it to just be an RSS feed, but instead got multiple RSS feeds and two types non-standard XML files, which I chose to call country selection files and just feeds.

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The Information Board can be configured for a particular country and language, and when accessing those localization settings, the PSP loads a non-standard XML file that lists all available feeds. The URLs are as follow:

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+ PS3: http://infoboard.ww.dl.playstation.net/download/infoboard/X/country-select-YYY.xml + PSP: http://infoboard.ww.dl.playstation.net/download/infoboard/p/X/country-select-YYY.xml +

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where X is a single lowercase letter for the SCE branch (a for America, e for Europe and j for Japan), and YYY is the console's target ID, a three-letter region code.

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My own PSP is localized for Europe (target ID CEL), therefore is under the SCEE division (code e). I therefore only had the URL to the /p/e/country-select-cel.xml feed, and the above deductions were found by iterating over every letter of the alphabet or over every known target ID in Python. The infoboard's server does not seem to have any header detection or DDoS protection installed, so that made my job easier.

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country selection files

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the file's syntax is rather simple, so much that I made a DTD to validate it. it has two main parts: messages and countries. I could not find any actual use for the messages part in a PS3 or PSP, but I assume that those messages were here to provide an internationalized description of the information board.

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The countries part is what you can actually see on a PS3 or PSP. You will get a simple list with each feed name, and selecting one feed will pick its news_url. The skin_url is not used on a PSP, but on a PS3, it seems to define how its widget looks like.

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known country selection URLs

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RegionPS3PSP
Europe + /e/country-select-cel.xml + + /p/e/country-select-cel.xml +
United Kingdom + /e/country-select-cek.xml + + /p/e/country-select-cek.xml +
Russia + /e/country-select-ru3.xml + + /p/e/country-select-ru3.xml +
Australia and New Zealand + /e/country-select-au3.xml + + /p/e/country-select-au3.xml +
United States + /a/country-select-uc2.xml + + /p/a/country-select-uc2.xml +
Mexico + /a/country-select-mx2.xml + + /p/a/country-select-mx2.xml +
Japan + /j/country-select-j1.xml + + /p/j/country-select-j1.xml +
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feeds

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The news_url attributes in the country selection files points to the actual information board feeds, which follow two different structures depending on the use of a PSP or a PS3. PSPs get actual, valid RSS feeds, while PS3s get some proprietary structure, whose DTD I wrote here.

I believe the reason why the PS3 does not have a standard format while the PSP does is because later PSP firmwares are able to parse RSS feeds in its RSS reader feature.

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One interesting note is that the PSP's RSS reader ignores <link> tags, preferring to use <media:content> tags to only allow images, audio or video formats, while the information board only has a thumbnail and a URL. Why could the PSP's RSS reader not open unsupported URLs in a browser? Or are the PSP's manual and nice specification for this feature misleading? This will be studied at a later stage.

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The feeds just boil down to displaying a title, a date, a thumbnail and having a URL to open the news articles in the console's browser. Some feeds are provided in multiple country selection files. The feeds all have been abandoned around 2010.

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known feeds

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NamePS3PSPAvailability
CELCEKRU3AU3UC2MX2J1
Australialinklink××××
Bulgaria (en)1linklink××××
Belgium (fr)linklink××××
Belgium (nl)linklink××××
Czech Republic (en)linklink××××
Denmark (en)linklink××××
Germanylinklink××××
Greece (en)linklink××××
Spainlinklink××××
Francelinklink××××
Irelandlinklink××××
Italialinklink××××
Luxembourg (fr)linklink××××
Luxembourg (de)linklink××××
Netherlands (de)linklink××××
New Zealandlinklink××××
Norway (en)linklink××××
Austrialinklink××××
Poland (en)linklink××××
Portugallinklink××××
Russialinklink××××
Switzerland (de)linklink××××
Switzerland (fr)linklink××××
Switzerland (it)linklink××××
South Africalinklink××××
Finlandlinklink××××
Swedenlinklink××××
Middle Eastlinklink××××
United Kingdomlinklink××××
United States2linklink××
Canada (en)2linklink××
Canada (fr)2linklink××
Mexico (alias for US)2linklink×
Japan3linklink×
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1All four country selection files for Bulgaria reference bg/bg on PS3 and bg/en on PSP. The actual feeds are at bg/bg, but they are in English.

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2All North American feeds suffer from encoding issues: their feeds are defined as UTF-8, but their text is in extended ASCII.

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3The Japanese PS3 and PSP feeds suffer from different issues: the PS3 feed has some malformed XML and the PSP feed is missing an XML namespace.

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todo

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Trying to access the Information Board on a PSP without a Memory Stick will display a “No Memory Stick inserted” message. This could mean the selected feed (and potentially other options) are stored in said memory stick. Therefore, it might be possible to alter the selected feed to make it point at anything. Would it be possible to make our own custom RSS feeds? I would love to have one as the changelog of this project.

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+ + diff --git a/infoboard/ps3-feed.dtd b/infoboard/ps3-feed.dtd new file mode 100644 index 0000000..90a0d9c --- /dev/null +++ b/infoboard/ps3-feed.dtd @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ + + +