Xbox Runs Its First Legal Homebrew App

PineGreen writes: "As Michael Steil, the Xbox Linux project leader says:'On the Xbox Linux website, you can download "linuxpreview," an application that runs on modded Xboxes and is completeley legal, because the XDK was not used for development, and it does not contain any Microsoft code.'. See the X-box logo and Tux on the same screen. More information here."

Comments

$200,000 Award???

[donnacha]

So, do they win the $200, 000 Award?

Re:Hey, Linux running on x86?

[Pig Hogger]

What a colossal waste of time.

It's not if it annoys the beejeesus out of Microsoft...

Needs signing from Microsoft?

[bolind]

From the page:

>This is the first legal homebrew application!
>Of course you will need a modded Xbox.
>Microsoft, could you please sign this application?

What does this mean? Does an unmodded Xbox contain a list or some other sort of checking mechanism that only allows certain programs to run on it?

Re:Needs signing from Microsoft?

[Fjord]

Xboxes, like other disc based consoles, check the discs they run to make sure they aren't pirated copies. Otherwide, anyone with a DVD-RW could make a copy from a local Blockbuster (or download an ISO off the net but blockbuster is more convinient). Unfortunately, this means that programs that you make and burn to disc won't run because it won't pass the check.

Mods remove the copy checking so that you can run backed up or copied discs.

Re:Needs signing from Microsoft?

[Fjord]

It comes down to assurance of quality. Downloading off of Kazaa can be a real let down and for files of this size can also take several days (because the people who have them sign on and off). I live a block and a helf away from a Blockbuster, so maybe I should say *for me* it's more convinent, but I'm not the only one I know who prefers this method: my exroomate (at a different place very far from a blockbuster) would rent about 20 games at a time and then copy them and return them the next day. Maybe downloading 1 ISO is easier, but 20 is a pain.

A funny story: the another roomate in the same place was into ISOs on IRC. Someone in the channel had a rare Japanese market game ISO. My roomate asked the guy what he wanted. The roomate then copied his windows swap file to whatever.iso (where whatever was the name of the game the guy wanted). They then swapped "ISOs". A day later our firewall was DOSsed. We figure the guy didn't take too kindly to the trade :)

Linux Set Radio: Future

[grungebox]

Think of all the gaming possibilities now available to X-Box developers! 'Shell Scripting Xtreme!' or 'Marvel vs. Capcom vs. Vi vs. emacs!' I hear in the next Halo your standard gun fires tarballs and RPM's.

X-box Linux app

[inode_buddha]

Hah! I hope these guys just happen to have tickets to the LinuxWorld Expo. That wouls be a great place for a demo....

Re:Waste of Time

[terradyn]

Don't you realize the potential of having a cheap web server farm? these boxes are worth 450 or so in hardware and you can get them for less than 200 now. You'd save a huge amount of money using these as linux boxes.

Not At All a Waste of Time

[donnacha]

What a colossal waste of time.

Hardly. If widespread modding, driven by a quite likely boom in Divx Movie piracy, becomes a reality, Xbox Linux could, no doubt much to the horror of "real" Linux folk, become by far the most popular form of consumer/home Linux.

Sometimes success can arrive in unexpected forms.

Re:Hey, Linux running on x86?

[Craig Maloney]

Actually I think several unsupported drivers were coded for this effort... It's called the XBox (in total).

Why get all pissy with people who are enjoying themselves and are coding something that could potentially useful? I'm sure folks made similar claims when Linus rolled out his first kernel. "Why a new kernel? What a collosal waste of time! Think of all of the effort that could have been put into writing something for (insert favorite OS from 1993)

That's OK, though. All of us are short sighted in our lives. I used to think the same way about KDE and GNOME. "What collosal wastes of time" I used to think. Fortunately those very talented programmers didn't listen to the naysayers. Now I don't scoff when someone ports Linux to different hardware architectures. Hey, it's their life. Let them have fun with it.

Re:Waste of Time

[totallygeek]

My only question is Why?

I have often wondered why Linux has been ported to just about even processor under the sun. I have thought it was such a waste because that intelligence could be making Linux better for platform processors more supported. However, I have seen this as a great way to draw interest to Linux. It has become an attention getter -- I mean, who has a Microsoft Windows watch? Plus, most of the people working on these side projects are strongly focused on other Linux ventures, and these make nice breaks in their daily grind of coding. Most of all, though, it revives that hacker spirit some have lost -- make something work against all odds; learn the system in and out; and, do the impossible!

Re:Waste of Time

[oyenstikker]

Because they want to. They are using their resources to do something they want to do. They don't owe you anything. Open source hackers don't exist to make free software for you. They exist because they like doing it.

(I can almost hear you all gasping.)

To all of you hackers that have influenced and contributed to progams that I use: Thank you!

To all of you hackers that spend your time doing things that I find utterly useless: Have fun!

Re:Waste of Time

[chabotc]

Well thats a simple question to awnser. Depening on your intrests you might want to:

1) Make a microsoft sponsored linux box / workstation (they loose money on the hardware, so what could be sweeter!)

2) Make a microsoft sponsored DVD / MPG / DivX / MP3 player

3) Make a microsoft sponsored Top set box

4) Make a nice quiet, cheap, fast enough, linux web / email / ftp server / etc, sponsored by microsoft!

5) All of the above? ;-)

Personaly i can not wait. The xbox is nice and small, and still relativly quiet. I think my first use for it will be to hook up a (usb?) network to it, and use it to play movies and mp3's from my server on my tv, saving my self the hassle of having to drag around notebooks or dedicate a big, ugly noisy pc to that function.

Then hook up a nice wireless usb keyboard w/ intergrated trackball, and do a full screen galeon to create a nice web surfing / topset box experiance from the comfort of my couch.

Then maybe hook up all the posible home automation gimics to a nice interface thru the xbox / tv, and be able to control my house from my tv?

Then, install some tv cards on my server, and pipe its output to the xbox .. posibly extend with those nice linux mpg recording programs to make my own tivo style setup

Also, I wonder if my current colocation facility will accept xbox's ?

Man, the posibilities are endless, for a little under 300 bucks (and going down) and the sheere thought of microsoft sponsoring my linux projects, it's worth every bit of effort these developers are putting in to it!

Re:Waste of Time

[Psiren]

Why am I wasting my time writing an email client when so many already exist? Because I enjoy it, and have learnt a lot from it. If you're not programming for money, what other reasons do you need than those?

Not necessarily

[DABANSHEE]

There are companies that make cd cloning machines, which do all the copying in hardware, no software exists to decipher the track. IE the reader just records into ram a streaming image of the bips 'n blips which is streamed into the burner at realtime (or virtually realtime) & recorded onto the new CD, well something like that.

So the copy is exactly the same as the original, Consequently such hardware CD cloners work even if the original CD is formatted in the HFS, BFS or any other file system type. Even CDs that have been partitioned (want of a better word) & have 2 ISO images burnt onto it, or even both ISO & HFS images on it will burn fine. To the machine its just bips 'n blips.

I've used one of these machines myself. There would be absolutelly no way that a Xbox would be able to tell a original from a cloned CD. As there's no anti-copy protection by-pass measures built in, & as they cant tell the difference between copyrighted & non-copyrighted CDs, owning/making/selling such machines does't break any laws, even if the user does.

Re:Not necessarily

[Fjord]

Hmmm. I'd have to see one of these work. My understanding is that the original discs have something on them that regular discs don't have. In this way original playstation or xbox discs aren't any kind of standard (on purpose), so this machine would have to be tooled specifically to make these discs. It's not a matter of burners not being able to make copies of the data (they can make them perfectly fine, as evedenced by the fact that backups work on a modded console), but that the discs have something special that the console checks for, probably outside of the data range.

Re:Not necessarily

[DeadMeat (TM)]

In the case of PSX discs, they are intentionally burned with errors. Assuming your CD copier doesn't barf on the errors, your CD copying software will probably correct them for you. Then when the PSX boots, it reads the disc, finds no errors, and refuses to run the game.

It doesn't take a special drive to copy PSX discs -- just software that will do raw copies of CDs, a CD/DVD-ROM drive that can do raw reads, and a CD burner that can do raw writes (which is most of them nowadays). You don't need special media, either, aside from the fact that some PSX models have lasers that "like" the material of some CD-Rs better than others.

I'm not sure about the X-Box, but it probably has a similar copy-protection scheme. IIRC it also has the requirement that all software be digitally signed by Microsoft to try to stop unlicensed games. (To further discourage unlicensed game-making, legit X-Box DVDs are also burned "backwards" -- that is, instead of going from the inside of the disc to the outside it goes in the opposite direction. I'm not sure how, if at all, this affects copying, since I doubt a raw copy cares what direction it's being done in.)

Re:Not necessarily

[Citizen of Earth]

It's not a matter of burners not being able to make copies of the data (they can make them perfectly fine, as evedenced by the fact that backups work on a modded console), but that the discs have something special that the console checks for, probably outside of the data range.

So you just need to make your Commodore-64 disk nibbler scan all the way out to track 40.

Re:Price comparision

[Daytona955i]

Here's why... because they can...

People often ask me why I got a linux kit for my ps2... I only tell them that if they have to ask they wouldn't understand.

Also don't you want to screw Microsoft? In order for Microsoft to make any money (or to break even for that matter) they need to sell something like 30 games per xbox user. (They get about $5 per game) Why? Because they are selling the XBox for less than is costs to make. Now say you can get an XBox and install linux (and not buy any games) and you and your friends all do the same and install linux and have fun with it. Microsoft looses a lot of money because you aren't even buying 1 game for the xbox. Therefore Microsoft looses lots of money on the XBox project and then decide to bow out to Sony and Nintendo. It would finally be a place where Microsoft has failed.

That is what I would do... just to screw MS.

However, those screen shots look kindof hokey and I don't actually see linux booting, just one line at the top. Anyone actually get it to work?

Legal HomeBrew Application ??

[AftanGustur]

What kind of world/reality are we living in, where your own software can be anything else than "legal" ??

Completely legal?

[ultraright]

How exactly is running code on a modded XBox completely legal?

Re:Completely legal?

[alannon]

My guess would be, RUNNING the program itself is not legal, since you need to mod your X-Box to do that, and you 'agreed' not to do that when you opened the box (yes, the whole idea of that is under legal dispute right now), but distributing the program itself is completely legal, since it does not use any copyrighted Microsoft code.

Re:Completely legal?

[dattaway]

Ford released their new line of cars, which gets 200MPG, but can only reach speeds of 80MPH. Technically, there is a way to make Ford's new cars go 160MPH, but their EULA strictly forbids opening the hood for any reason, punishable by 20 years in prison. Doing so could be considered circumventing activity for reprogramming the car. They needed to do this, because their more expensive models feature a software upgrade and brightly colored stickers to make it go faster. You muck around under the hood, you threaten their revenue stream. Many engineers at Ford would starve due to your criminal intentions.

Well, wouldn't you know it, several teenagers who weren't old enough to drive got underneath the hood of their parents automobile while dad was away at work. You see, one family had the high end model, and the other didn't. The kids were intrigued. One thing led to another, and next thing you know they were caught and led to jail. They wouldn't have been caught if it weren't for that spectacular joyride lighting up the street across the town.

The same can be said about an xbox near you. It usually takes a kid about two years to learn enough about a computer system to learn its language and make something useful. Usually, these projects are done by the young who have all the free time in the world. And they would consider it a patriotic duty to be caught too. I remember my first computer, a ZX81. It was 13 at the time and it took a few years before I had the ROM dissassembled and controlling the hardware directly. No documentation, no internet. I'm sure the internet and millions of people from countries all over the world can get together and come up with something.

Isn't that a contridiction?

[CMiYC]

" an application that runs on modded Xboxes and is completeley legal"

I'm pretty sure the EULA for the XBox hardware states that you can not modify it and that you can only run authorized applications (games) on it. That being the case, how is this "completely legal"? It seems to me that in order to be completely legal, the software would have to have the proper license from Microsoft in order to run.

Re:Isn't that a contridiction?

[dattaway]

Simply refuse the EULA and wipe the useless and annoying default xbox software, replace with useful Linux, problem solved. Surely, they didn't make it so easy...

The only thing I would be worried about is a hardware implimented suicide logic bomb. Let's say Microsoft hid a little calendar watchdog that sends the operating system a special interrupt ever so often, demanding a special answer.

I'm thinking about this from the hardware designer's point of view, if they were smart enough to do this... If the software refuses to honor this request, the watchdog would update the death counter. Let's say they made this counter 4 bits long to be forgiving. When it counts down to zero without being reset, the security watchdog knows for sure rebel scum have defeated the imperial forces. The watchdog then simply sends out some low level hardware instructions through the IO ports for every programmable chip. The logic bombs have been set.

To further obfuscate this event, the hardware could have been designed to trigger the event upon the next power up cycle. Once this state is triggered, the xbox enteres a comotose state and is effectively dead. Or is it? Do they have an option for "factory service" to revive these things? Is the bomb reset by placing a certain IO line at an odd voltage level? Or is it permently latched?

How Can MS Effectively Prosecute This?

[Peahippo]

This places Open Source on their equipment and that just looks bad for Microsoft. I say "looks bad" in the MSian view of closed technology and monopolistic control of same; kind of an ego thing. Paranoia strikes me, but in such cases of legal precision, IANAL who specializes in corporate software defense.

Is there some way MS can paint the event as an illegality of some sort, just to get some court action? After all, they have the rafts of lawyers, and the geeksters don't, so once again the rare and elusive justice can be mis-served by bankrupting the opponent. How about: placing another OS on the XBox constitutes "intent to violate copyright" since obviously you will be after all those game DVDs. The DMCA allegedly forbids circumventing copy protection, so perhaps all MS has to do is get a judge or jury to believe that these 1337 h4xx0r5 were aiming in that direction.

Just curious. I never ask myself if I'm being paranoid -- instead, I ask if I'm being paranoid enough.

Re:How Can MS Effectively Prosecute This?

[dattaway]

So, am I being a DMCA violator for taking the system apart and putting it back together like it wasn't intended? I ask this question, because many people have done odd things like take apart a perfectly good new or used car and assemble it into some crazy artistic, but functional creation to show off to their peers. The same could and will be done to the xbox.

Or does the DMCA only apply to programmable devices? Thanks to the xbox, will it now be illegal for me to take apart my programmable air conditioner and modify it to be a dehumidifier?

I don't know about you, but when I see a product at the store, I look for its other uses too. Can it be taken apart and modified to suit me better? What parts does it have inside to make my other projects more worthwhile? Does the sum of the parts inside make it worth my purchase? Does the $200 xbox have $700 worth of discrete parts inside for my graphics project? Is the black van parked down the street going to bust down my door and tell me There Are No User Servicable Parts Inside and I should be a good consumer and not do what God had not intended for Adam and Eve were commanded to do? That sounds silly. I see an opportunity.

The xbox is my toy. I find the hardware a challenge. Its the worlds greatest technical challenge. Many people run 26 miles to win a race, but the first to crack this puzzle wins and takes a one-time place in history. There can only be one. Who will it be?

What kind of world?

[jawad]

A brave new one.

nope - read the box

[BlueboyX]

There is a EULA on the OUTSIDE of the xbox package. It forbids you from running unauthorized code. And they defend this EULA in the courts because it is plainly viewable to users before/as they are buying the unit, rather than being only visable after you open the box.

Bummer.

Re:Hey, Linux running on x86?

[pigeonhed]

You right a colossal waste of time. Perhaps if we organized into a huge corporation and had someone with a huge ego running things we could slowly take over market share and then crush all who oppose us. Then we could slowly destroy all innovation and force our corporate viewpoint upon all others. opps yeah it has already been done.

Private property

[dmaxwell]

Maybe because once I buy something then it's mine. Period. End of story. We aren't talking about some sort of nebulous "intellectual property". An XBox is a physical good. If I'm not using it to play copied games then not even the DMCA remotely applies. They are getting full access to their own personal property and no one who holds copyrights on the contents of a Linux distro cares either.....as long as the changes to GPL stuff is released anyway.

Incidentally, this is how to torpedo them in any propaganda wars. No ultra conservative Republican is going to come out against private property. Once the money changes hands, it is the buyers property.

Re:Private property

[analog_line]

Obligatory Preface: I am not a lawyer.

How exactly does the DMCA not apply here? Modders (of all console systems) are bypassing technological measures designed to stop illegally copied software from functioning. That it allows you to run Linux on it is irrelevant in the eyes of the law, as the case against 2600 magazine, which they themselves gave up on, establishes the precedent for. See also the Elcomsoft case, but less so. DECSS has no bearing on the actual copying of DVDs, it gives anyone who puts out a DVD the mechanism to control what their media will play on, and the courts have upheld the DMCA's blanket protection of such mechanisms so far as completely constitutional.

The things that an Xbox mod circumvents is such a technological mechanism. The actual purpose of those doing the modding is irrelevant, just as it has been in the Elcomsoft and 2600 Magazine cases, they courts ruled that the circumvention, for any reason, is the illegal activity, not the intent.

Not that I mind that people are doing it, but if you believe that those creating and distributing mod chips for the Xbox are on any kind of solid legal ground, you are fooling yourself. I expect Microsoft has a team of lawyers working hard on creating a case for this, whenever they determine they want to go to trial over it.

Waste of time? I think not

[Joey7F]

Some people have jokingly said That it is not a waste of time as long as we are annoying M$.

It is more than that! As with every product for consumers the way people hear about them is through advertising...pure and simple.

So every time Microsoft says they don't want linux being run on their hardware, it not only "bugs" M$ but it also gives Linux free publicity. Hell, if I were IBM, Red Hat et al. I would being running linux on anything and everything Microsoft just for the propaganada value alone!

No such thing as bad press, and this only makes Microsoft seem like a corrupt organization bent on making computing their way or the highway. Let 'em, to paraphrase Leia "The more they tighten their grip the more [operating] systems will slip through their grasp"

--Joey

Re:Legal HomeBrew Application ??

[jareds]

What kind of world/reality are we living in, where your own software can be anything else than "legal" ??

One where your own code is linked against someone else's libraries. The FSF won't let you distribute programs linked against their libraries unless you comply with their license either.

Re:backwards data

[frovingslosh]

You're missing the point. The spiral is actually in the other direction. Unless the duplicator motor goes backward the result will be different. Very different if the reader doesn't go backwards as well, as the media can't even be read properly in the normal direction of rotation. Remember, this isn't concentric tracks, this is a spiral of data.

Re:Waste of Time

[ceejayoz]

It's smaller than any of my computers...

Real games

[IamTheRealMike]

Who cares about Halo - what I want to play is XBill on an XBox. Now that would be hilarious, especially if you were to demonstrate one at LinuxWorld :)

Re:Legal HomeBrew Application ??

[Prior Restraint]

echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb15CB32EF3AF9C0E5D7272 C3AF4F2snlbxq'|dc

So what does this do, exactly? (no, I'm not stupid enough to just simply run it)

I am! It prints out an email address on my machine (omitted for the sake of avoiding harvesters).

Besides, what exactly is it that you're worried about? It's an echo piped to a calculator. About the worst that could happen is it prints something obscene.

brave man

[karlm]

A funny story: the another roomate in the same place was into ISOs on IRC. Someone in the channel had a rare Japanese market game ISO. My roomate asked the guy what he wanted. The roomate then copied his windows swap file to whatever.iso (where whatever was the name of the game the guy wanted). They then swapped "ISOs". A day later our firewall was DOSsed. We figure the guy didn't take too kindly to the trade :)

His swap file? Did he grep his swap file to make sure IE didn't swap out his credit card number recently? His home address? Passwords? Site membership username/password pairs? Network crypto credentials? His home machine LanMan and md4 password hashes?

Your friend is a bit too brave and/or not quite smart enough. There's a reason you can encrypt your swap in *BSD and Linux.

He should have half expected to wake up the next morning to a cubic yard of elephant dung and a baker's dozen of giant monogrammed pokemon vibrators charged to his credit card and shipped overnight to his mailing address from central Mongolia. He would have deserved it, I might add. He could have at least tried to get the file on an IOU basis. It's not like the other guy's bandwidth cost him more than his time. If I were the other guy, I'd take the oportunity to make a friend. No skin off my back and a quite useful philosophy. Of course, if your friend enjoys Mongolian elephant dung, giant vibrators, and DOS attacks, who am I to judge?