the psn's information board

contents

• introduction
• country selection files
  • known country selection URLs
• feeds
  • known feeds
• storage

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introduction

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, I found it as the last icon. I think I had never previously used it before, and more generally I think it has been one of the least used features of the PSP. Curiously, it was not updated for almost 10 years, but was still available.

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.

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:

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

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.

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.

I later discovered the existence of a Change Region option in my custom firmware and did a world trip to discover all of the available feeds and learn even more about some features that are locked to Japanese or Korean users.

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country selection files

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.

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

Region	PS3	PSP
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
South Korea	/as/country-select-kr2.xml	/p/as/country-select-kr2.xml
South-East Asia	/as/country-select-e12.xml	/p/as/country-select-e12.xml
Taiwan	/as/country-select-tw1.xml	/p/as/country-select-tw1.xml

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feeds

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.

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.

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

Name	PS3	PSP	Availability
			CEL	CEK	RU3	AU3	UC2	MX2	J1	KR2	E12	TW1
Australia	link	link
Bulgaria (en)1	link	link
Belgium (fr)	link	link
Belgium (nl)	link	link
Czech Republic (en)	link	link
Denmark (en)	link	link
Germany	link	link
Greece (en)	link	link
Spain	link	link
France	link	link
Ireland	link	link
Italia	link	link
Luxembourg (fr)	link	link
Luxembourg (de)	link	link
Netherlands (de)	link	link
New Zealand	link	link
Norway (en)	link	link
Austria	link	link
Poland (en)	link	link
Portugal	link	link
Russia	link	link
Switzerland (de)	link	link
Switzerland (fr)	link	link
Switzerland (it)	link	link
South Africa	link	link
Finland	link	link
Sweden	link	link
Middle East	link	link
United Kingdom	link	link
United States2	link	link
Canada (en)2	link	link
Canada (fr)2	link	link
Mexico (alias for US)2	link	link
Japan3	link	link
South Korea	link	link
Hong Kong (en)4	link	link
Hong Kong (zh-tw)4	link	link
Hong Kong (zh-cn)4	link	link
Indonesia (en)	—	link
Thailand (en)	—	link
Singapore (en)	link	link
Malaysia (en)	link	link
Taiwan	link	link

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.

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

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.

⁴The three Hong Kong feeds exist for the PS3, but are not listed on its country selection page; therefore, only the PSP feeds are still available.

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storage

Trying to access the Information Board on a PSP without a Memory Stick will display a “No Memory Stick inserted” message, because the country selection file is stored in the Memory Stick at ms0:/PSP/SYSTEM/INFBOARD/, inside a file with a 40-character name. I believe it is a SHA-1 hash, but could not determine where it came from; the file's SHA-1 did not match. Thumbnails are cached in TEMP/IMAGE/ in this same folder.

The selected feed is not however stored on the Memory Stick: it is stored inside flash1:/registry/system.dreg, a system registry that holds plain-text credentials for your PSN account and configured Wi-Fi connections and many other settings. This file can not normally be accessed with an official firmware, but some CFWs can make flash memory available over USB, or just allow you to run a file manager homebrew on the PSP.

The sorted selected feed was sorted in my registry at bytes 0x51E0 to 0x51EF, though I do not have enough data to prove this is a fixed position. Look for the uppercase INFOBOARD string, then keep scrolling through the file until you see locale_lang; this is the registry key. The value is located 0x1C0 bytes under it.

This value seems to be limited to something along the lines of 16 to 32 ASCII characters, and only stores the suffix, such as jp/jp/rss.xml. This sadly does not allow us to do much about customizing the RSS feed, unless we configure a DNS server to point at a server in our control.