This is definitely in response to the geohot hypervisor exploit. When they say "security update", they mean they're addressing a threat to their profit model. Pirated games and cheat modes for network play will be coming out in the future. The more Sony slows that down, the more revenue for both them and game developers.<p>What's interesting about this is that there is a good argument to be made for the availibility of Linux keeping hackers from showing much interest in the PS3 for a while. They may have bought their ~3 years of no piracy by providing Linux support. The other thing they did well was closely integrating the drive firmware with the core OS security, something Microsoft did not do with the Xbox360.<p>I previously wrote up a technical description of the exploit below. The comments section is pretty interesting as well.<p><a href="http://rdist.root.org/2010/01/27/how-the-ps3-hypervisor-was-hacked/" rel="nofollow">http://rdist.root.org/2010/01/27/how-the-ps3-hypervisor-was-...</a>
I think the geohot hack is just a red herring given that the PS3 Slim was released months before this hack happened and that it had no provision for Other OS installs. It is still terrible that this happening though.
It's interesting that Linux support is being withdrawn months after Linux was used as part of a memory exploit to break the PS3 security.
PS3 machine owners could ask who owns the machine in their front room.