Microsoft to Hire Xbox Hackers?

handsomepete writes "According to PlanetXbox, Microsoft is looking to hire 'software design engineers' to look into the properties of modchips and detection code for hardware. A background in game hacking knowledge is listed as a preferred talent. Will any of the Xbox Linux participants take a stab at this job?"

Comments

I would assume

[The Electric Messiah]

that any employment contract would forbid them from working on any of the XBox projects out there already, such as the XBox Linux Project, or from even disseminating any information they learn whatsoever. Maybe MS is trying to gut these projects before anything else is accomplished?

We all knew this was going to happen

[Powercntrl]

The Xbox is really just the pilot program for palladium. Once all the security holes are patched, Microsoft will then use what they've learned (after patenting it, of course) to create the most difficult-to-hack DRM PC standard.

Let's just hope sellout hackers aren't as good as not-for-profit hackers.

Re:We all knew this was going to happen

[zerocool^]

Why do you care if XBox is secure or not ?
IT'S A GAMES BOX for crying out loud.

Operating systems: Microsoft releases one every year or two. We'll say 1.5. Say people upgrade every other time (w-95 to w-Me, w-2000-w-XP), so that's one OS, bought for $150, every 3 years.

Video Game systems: Even on an off year, there are 100 titles. Chances are people will buy 6 or 8 in a year. At $50/pop, that's a lot of lost revenue they've lost in royalties over 3 years, a lot more than say operating system attrition. If people pirate games, they stand to lose more than from Operating Systems, and I'll tell you why:

A couple of key points that I've pointed out before. One: MICROSOFT does NOT CARE about individual piracy of windows. That's a fact. They care about idiots pirating it, and they care about coroprations pirating 4000 copies of it. They DO NOT CARE about the average slashdot reader pirating windows, for this reason: We are their free tech support. I pirate windows (sue me), and my dad asks me questions about how to work his computer, quote unquote. I would swear, being the "computer guru" has paid off for Microsoft more so than me, they've gotten their $200 worth out of me, in the way of I've prevented people with problems from contacting Microsoft. I have SAVED THEM MONEY, and therefore it is in their best interest to get windows, latest versions, into my hands as quickly as possible, and for free, so that I know it intimately.

Now, in the realm of games, they stand to lose money. The X-box is essentially an attempt to get into the game industry, specifically for the reasons outlined above: more people buy more video games than operating systems. More money is the bottom line to the X-box. Of course, they spent a god-damn fortune launching the thing with less than stellar titles, and competing with the PS-2's already entrenched lead and the backwards compatability of ps2-psx has proved hard. They can't stand to lose more money.

And speaking of the PS2: Sony, on the other hand, doesn't care if people pirate games for their systems. Why? They make money on the hardware. To play pirated playstation games, you first have to have a playstation. Any rumor that Sony lost money on the playstation or ps2 hardware is bull. They make the thing, and they make money on it.

Now, there once was going to be a Mod-Chip for the PS-2 that was going to eliminate the need for ANY knife trick, ANY boot disk, ANY game shark, etc etc, at the price of having 58 solder points. It was called the Messiah. There are several out there floating around as the Messiah chip, but to my knowledge, none of them actually are the origional planned chip. Sony shut the messiah chip down. Why? Why this one and not any of the others? Why not get the people that made the USB mod chip that needed the game shark?
Because in order for the messiah chip to work, the programmers had to disable ALL security checks, including reagion coding for DVD's, and other DVD anti-piracy measures. Sony had too high a stake in movies, which they stood to lose quite a bit more, enough to shut the Messiah down.

So, to sum up: Microsoft cares about X-Box game piracy, not OS piracy. Sony cares about movie piracy, not Game piracy. In short, it's all about the Benjamins.

~Will

Re:We all knew this was going to happen

[zerocool^]

Yes, but Sony makes a lot more on the hardware than Microsoft ever hoped to. Think about the origional PSX - sold in one itteration for, what, 8 years? 1 in 4 American households has one. I have 3, I've worn out the lasers on two of them. Microsoft, last I heard, was still selling X-Box under cost, expecting to make it up in games royalties, which appearantly are much higher than any other system, cause the developers don't have to work as hard to produce games (windows ce ports).

With sony, I think that they take a much smaller chunk of royalty for PS and PS2 games than Microsoft takes for X-box games. But, also, sony has a much higher stake in movies than in games. The same people that buy an operating system every 3 years, and a game every other month, will buy 2 or 3 DVD's per month.

I'm not saying they don't care about the money. I'm just saying they have their priorities in order. Sony seems to be a well run company, on the track to make good profit for quite a while, and in the meantime, still produce a good product.

Plus, when you sell as many copies of games as sony does, you can afford a little attrition: How many Tekken Tags or Final Fantasy X's or GTA 3's were sold? It's a lot, I can tell you that, more than X-Box games.

And also, I hate the X-box. Because of the reason microsoft got into the market: only to cash in, not to make quality games. Because of the lack of good games for it. Because of the controllers.

~Will

~Will

Unnamed Patron

[Perdo]

Perhaps the unnamed patron of the Linux X Box project is microsoft itself. They have been known to have an odd way of conducting job interview, this being an interview process similar to Halflife's.

Open Letter to Microsoft

[We're All Alike]

Dear Microsoft:

I am fully qualified for the position you have listed. In fact, I may be one of the most qualified applicants around. I have been hacking copy protect mechanisms since I was 7. I have something to tell you. You have heard this before from people just like me, but you have not listened.

You do not seem to realize that what you are doing, in your attempts to introduce completely 'trusted' computers, is evil. I'm not referring to your usual misguided 'save the world by taking it over' style of evil, I'm talking more of a killing kittens for fun kind of evil. You are, whether it is your intention or not, going to remove general purpose computing from the hands of the non-experts, and they won't know enough to stop you. Depending on your success I forsee one of two final results. The likeliest option is that you go out of business in 80 years, because your 'innovations' stunt the technological development of an entire generation and alienate those few who are intelligent enough to have become programmers anyways. In this case, you will set back humanity's development by hundreds of years. Or, alternately, you drive your existing user base to other platforms and go out of business in 5 years. I doubt you will allow the second option to happen.

I have not participated in the efforts to hack your hardware (XBox) previously because I did not want to support you by purchasing one. Now, I see the light. I, with the help of other slashdotters, have realized that the XBox is just a test run of your trusted computing initiatives. It is a chance for you to find the bugs in your system and fix them on a platform which attracts hackers, yet presents no serious loss when it is hacked. I have no doubt in my mind that if you manage to perfect this architecture you will waste no time in implementing it in desktop PCs and using your monopoly power to force a significant number of users over to it.

Therefore, this is my notice to you. I will not let you succeed. I am qualified for your position, but I will not be applying. I will be adding my intelligence to the effort to stop you, and I will succeed. And if I do not, it does not matter. Because I am not alone. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all. And, in the end, you will lose. I promise.

-JM
101010

(Posted anonymously because Microsoft's lawyers are more expensive than mine.)

Do what I did.

[SHEENmaster]

When I got my first job last summer, I flat out refused to sign anything but the paper giving them the right to deposit my paycheck.

I still got the job. I doubt M$ would accept that.

Try signing John Doe to those documents, see if anyone notices.

Re:BS Required

[Jerf]

To give a serious answer, this sort of job would really benefit from a good grasp of formal methods and provability of correctness, along with a firm grasp of the theoretical underpinnings of security beyond just practical experience cracking it; you can crack things all your life and still be only marginally more competent to create a good system yourself then the next programmer. (Indeed, you may suffer for the exposure to so many bad examples.)

Of course you might learn all of this outside of school... but the same people who sneer at school tend to sneer at this level of understanding and also seem to think that computer science == programming. Requiring a degree is one step towards weeding those folks out. (Remember that weeding a person out is not free from a business perspective, so it literally pays to have such easy criteria to filter on.) It also demonstrates a certain minimal facility with working with this sort of rigor, which is one of the greatest glaring weaknesses in the most self-taught computer scientists^W programmers.

Given the background necessary to really do a good job, I'm kinda surprised they aren't requiring a Masters or PhD in related speciality. Perhaps that would narrow the market too much.

Brian Hook of id Software said it best...

[lpontiac]

In an interview several years ago in boot magazine:

"This is my view of the people who work at Microsoft: You have a choice. You have to realize that what you're doing is bad for the industry. If you're doing stuff that you don't even agree with and do it for the money- we have a word for that: Whore."

Re:Call me crazy, but...

[warmcat]

This is evidently the case, as no one working on the project has had any approach from MS so far.

I think they see it as some distance away from the center of gravity of their customer base, which is mostly pimply -> wrinkly twitchers. Plus they probably rightly see that actually very few of their customers overall will ever get a modchip that is necessary to run it.. 1%-5% something like that.

However the other week Michael Steil, the project lead had Open Office up. That really made me think, with a little more maturity and slickness, quickly and easily booting into being able to run Mozilla, Mplayer, Office apps, all from a free CD and a $10 USB keyboard could potentially give MS nightmares from several angles. What's needed now is a) to still work with the new 'secure' version that's in the pipeline, and b) preferably some way to get control of the machine without a modchip.

On the job offer, most of the folks working on the project are in the EU, and several (although not necessarily all) do not find themselves philisophically aligned with the aims of MS. But if anyone wants to join them, I'd wish them good luck against the modchip manufacturers, they'll need it. I think that kind of job could be interesting, but if they day dawns that you 'win', the excitement fades, the scales fall from your eyes and you look around at the smoking ruins you have caused.