The Bricking Issues

For a while PS3News had been editing Team M33's firmware and removing the credits, they did this to re brand the firmware and make out that they had created it, this of course pissed Team M33 off and they had to protect their firmware from some shitty tactics by PS3News, when PS3News edited the CFW, they caused it to brick hundreds of PSP's, PS3News also stole the source code of Dark_Alex's OE Firmware, doxed him and released personal information of various scene developers, here are some quotes from various websites regarding the matter.

 Apperently, the admin of the ps3 news site had a long history of taking
 other peoples work and modifying the credits to make it look as though 
 he had been the one who had created it. 
 When he started doing the same with team m33's firmware realeases, 
 they used some kind of encryption on their latest custom firmware which
 would cause the data written to the psp's flash chip to become corrupted 
 causing the psp to "brick".
 Team m33 included a warning with the custom firmware which stated that 
 the firmware would brick the psp if the code was modified in any way, but 
 the admin of ps3news ignored that, removed the warning, and changed the 
 credits anyway. 
 Well, it wasn't long before people started complaining about their bricked psp's,
 but the admin did nothing about it and even left the modified firmware up on the 
 site for 24 hours knowing full well that people were killing their psp and even going 
 so far as deleting warnings and rants from pissed off people from the forums. 
 That's the jist of it I guess. 

Source

 On August 19, 2007, Team M33 released the third edition of 3.52 M33, 3.52 M33-3. Changes are added to this firmware, which includes: USB access to flash2 and flash3, added processor speeds 75 and 133, added vshmenu which can 
 be used to dump UMDs or access other storage areas from recovery or by pressing menu on XMB, added support for UMD video ISOs, added support for popsloader 3.30. This update included a mechanism to cause the PSP to brick 
 during updating if it detected the update had been modified, this was done in retaliation to the website ps3news rebranding the custom firmware releases as their own work. The website ps3news kept the bricking update on 
 their website for more than 24 hours while censoring forum comments reporting bricked PSPs caused by the modified update.

Source

A quote from Dark_Alex

 Streak, despite i was attacked by that page, i contacted that page and we made some kind of "no agression" pact. They have been violating that pact lots of times, even now that I left the scene, they do it even more.
 The have been putting recently my supossed name in his page, some times with initials, but the other day he posted it fully.
 What do they think they achieve by putting my real name? I really don't mind that, they cannot even probe is me or just the paypal owner. But they do it like trying to act as a "mafia" so sony can see the names of authors. 
 They did same when Noobz released 3.03 HEN+downgrader, they put the ip of fanjita. They don't only not have respect for homebrew authors, but they put them in danger.
 As for me, neither spanish police nor Sony needs a retard administrator of a loosers page to put my name, they have their own means to find me, much more efective than visiting a paypal address, so i cannot care less about 
 them showing that name. IF someone from my environment know who i am, i will receive congrats because i have done no evil. It would be different if the name and address of the administrator of that page were leaked. He would 
 actually be in physical danger, because he has not stopped of annoying developers from several years. He plays with fire, too bad for him, fire burns.
 As you can see, there is nothing it can be done against that guy violating homebrew coders rights, so i see fair that coders are fighting them in dirty way to protect themselves or other coders. It is useless to talk to 
 them, they still continue doing same things they have been done for years. I regret to have talked to them that time, it was the worst loose of time i have ever done. And i regret too not to have done the same in OE.

Source