Slashdot Mirror

chromatic writes "ONLamp has just published an interview with Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, author of Hacking the Xbox. Bunnie discusses the effect of the DMCA on his work and the state of Xbox hacking as he sees it."

Slashback tonight with a passel of updates, corrections and tangents related to recent Slashdot postings, including GNU/Linux vs. Windows in Munich, Bunnie Huang's book on Xbox hacking, Mozilla's 5-line crash-test, and (sigh) yet another SCO note, but at least it's one to smile at. Read on for the details.

How to impress users. chjones writes "The bug that crashes Mozilla with simple HTML has been fixed in the latest nightly build. This was previously mentioned in a Slashback in response to a similar bug in Internet Explorer. No nightly build of IE appears to be available."

Quiet but sterile, or silent and deadly? JerryKnight writes "With the wider availability of TouchStream keyboards, such as at ThinkGeek, I wonder if these great devices are used by anyone else besides me. Since the last story over a year ago, Fingerworks has made quite a few improvements, such as many firmware upgrades and the (currently still Beta) Gesture Editor. Does anyone else find the gesture/mouse benefits to outweigh the headache of learning zero-force typing?"

Would you like to play a game? bigattichouse writes "When I read the piece on using gaming to keep your brain moving, it reminded me of several articles on coders needing 'ramp-up' time to get into coding. I put together a small freeware game PortaLogica as a preliminary attempt to create a game that would help stimulate coding-related-thought. The game is played using schematic logic gates, and trying to get inputs to match outputs. I'd love to flesh it out a bit more (like writing a KDE or Gnome version)..."

Offically official. Alexander Schatten writes "Although Steve Ballmer interrupted his holiday to try to change the decision of the Munich politicians, after some weeks of discussion Munich decided today to change all 14.000 PCs, Notebooks to Linux. Servers as well as Clients!

One of the main reasons was to avoid a too close binding to specific vendors. A wise decision, one will confirm, especially as Munich is one of the biggest cities in Germany and might be an example for other cities. For more details see: SuSE or heise.de (both in German)"

Buy it while it's legal. An anonymous reader writes "Remember Bunnie Huang? He's the MIT student who first hacked the Xbox. He wrote a book that was supposed to be published by a well-known publisher, but the publisher chickened out, afraid of Microsoft's wrath. Bunnie isn't so scared, however. He's publishing the book himself. The book, "Hacking the Xbox," can be purchased from his website. I just saw Bunnie on TechTV, and he's offering a 20 percent discount to TechTV viewers (Scroll to bottom of article to see the coupon code)."

The famous Finnish art of the insult. scotch51 writes "I followed the links to the Raelians website on Friday after ./ reported Linus Torvalds comparing the amazing SCO lawsuit to the Raelians claims of amazing (bio)technological achievements. Today, wanting to show a friend the Raelians rather pretty twist on the Star of David for their own logo, I see that all pages I'd visited yesterday report blank. "Reveal codes" on every page I visited yesterday reveals only: html body /body /html. Guess that's one way to deal with being slashdotted, or were they perhaps hacked?"

SecurityFocus posted an article today about a new book that covers hacking the Xbox. The book's author, Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, reports that it's selling well, even though the release date has not yet arrived. Presumably, this is because the book covers soldering techniques and adding features like blue LEDs and modchips to Xboxes, most of which violate the DMCA. If this stuff is interesting to you, you can order a copy from Huang's site. It amazes me that a book such as this could be banned, yet car service manuals can be sold in most bookstores.