Slashdot Mirror
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?"
It probably says something about the employee being neutered and lobotomized on page 16 paragraph 9f.
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?
"Bold as Love"
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.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
As soon as someone provides something innovative to the community, there goes MS buying up all the talent so that they die a quiet death in one of the gray offices in Redmond.
When will they finally see that the best way to improve MS is to allow the Open Source developer community free rein in order to come out with more and more brilliant ideas and concepts?
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Which will be larger... the XBox, or the hackers hired to break it?
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
Ackbar: "It's a trap!"
-Matt
Will any of the Xbox Linux participants take a stab at this job?
Why? So they can be part of the winning team that kills modchips forever?
no thanks.
[I cam sure that others could cook up something like this, a poster or something, with far greater finesse than this quick effort]
Then You may qualify to Become a Minion for his Satanic Majesty today
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
from the job application...
1. Do you have expertise with modification chips?
2. If so, do you know other people who have your level of expertise with these chips?
3. If you answered yes to number 3, provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses of all of these people. We're interested in prosecuting^H^H^H^H^H contacting them.
What better way to beat the mod chip makers then to recruit them.
"BS in Computer Science or Computer Engineering required."
There's hacking classes in college? Somebody needs to smack the entire H.R. dept. for weeding out a lot of talented folks.
-Lucas
I just pictured this conversation in my head:
Minion: Sir?
Head of XBox Development: Yes?
Minion: We've been hearing reports of people hacking the XBox. Apparently its quite easy.
Head of XBox Development: (rubs temples) Alright. How many do you think there are?
Minion: Pardon?
Head of XBox Development: How many developers?
Minion: Oh. Couldn't be more than 30, sir.
Head of XBox Development: (breathes a sigh of relief) That's all? You had me worried for a minute there. Is the alligator pit and trapdoor working?
Minion: Yes sir. I just had maintenence check it over this morning.
Head of XBox Development: Excellent. And the other alligators?
Minion: The lawyers? Already creating reasonable doubt.
Head of XBox Development: Good. Alright, post a job offer with a handsome salary. Make sure you put the word "hacker" in it.
Minion: I'll get right on that-
Head of XBox Development: One more thing!
Minion: Yes, sir?
Head of XBox Development: Make sure slashdot finds out. Wouldn't want to miss any developers, now would we?
Minion: (smiles evilly) No, sir. I'll give our friends over there a call.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
There's hacking classes in college? Somebody needs to smack the entire H.R. dept. for weeding out a lot of talented folks.
I distinctly remember taking a Linux kernel hacking class when I was in college which amongst other things included hacking Linux on the iPaq. I also seem to remember that one of my group members was in a video game class at the same time which included projects such as hack Quake I.
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.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
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.)
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.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
A number of games in Japan (and even a few in the US) included 'modchip detection' code that would prevent the game from working on Playstation consoles with modchips installed. Of course, the "protection" could be easily bypassed with either a Gameshark (or similar device) or with a crack applied to a CD image of the game. The result was that gamers who used modchips solely to play legally purchased imports were out of luck while the pirates could continue on without problems. Might have even pushed a few to the 'dark side'.
I suspect that any modchip detection code in the XBox will have a similar effect.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Can I take my Game Genie to the interview?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
You're crazy.
I read this somewhere before, and perhaps it bears restating. Maybe we need to set up a web site with a Hippocratic Oath of sorts for things we WILL NOT DO, like creating software and standards that take away freedoms. Perhaps a "Hall of Shame" as well for those who break the oath?
In my opinion they're concerned. XBox is kinda a pilot for future DRM implementation. In fact they could really gain experience from XBox Linux Project to improve DRM...
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."
Despite the harsh tone in your message which leaves one wondering about your personal communication skills, you probably do have more discipline then most BS holders if you truly did go through the Navy (impossible to even begin to guess with an AC). But I'd point out that I never used the word discipline (note correct spelling).
I used the word rigor. As in mathematical rigor. I bothered to reply to such an obvious troll because it's a rather common misconception. You can be as disciplined as you want, but there are certain projects that must be completed using stronger techniques, not just by trying harder. Certainly college grads don't have a lock on either trying harder or knowlege of stronger techniques, but a college grad who used college to their advantage will certainly tend towards a much stronger comprehension and broader knowlege of such techniques. It's a tendency strong enough for Microsoft to use it as a filter criterion with the confidence that they will be cutting far, far more bad prospects then they will be losing good ones.
(Another problem people have is comparing a well-motivated self-taught programmer against a frat-boy who happens to be taking Comp. Sci. as his excuse to qualify to live in the frat house. Comparing well-motivated college grads against well-motivated self-taught programmers will show wide disparities in certain skills that are importent at certain times, especially those that are the reason we call it computer science and not computer programming in college. This is one of them; creating security (as opposed to merely cracking it) is hard ; it's possible, but very hard to gain a true appreciation of the truth of that statement without either going through the classes, or replicating the class experience by reading papers in the field, texts on the subject, etc. until you might as well have taken the class. You really can't putter aimlessly around a field as complicated as security and expect to do half as well as people who have made a concentrated effort to learn from decades of experience of the best and brightest... usually in class, at least to start.)
To counter-troll, missing the distinction between rigor and discipline is exactly the sort of rigor I'm talking about. "Self-taught" programmers make exactly those sort of mistakes in truly technical fields all the time, and the shoddy software that results can be downloaded from Sourceforge anytime you like. Some problems are hard; it's really a form of hubris to think that you can do as well (or better(!)) then the entire academic community, which comprises thousands of very smart people working together. The system ain't perfect, but it's hella hard to beat working all by your lonesome.
(Another example of poor thinking is exhibited by all those "self-taught" types who see people like me claim a correlation between skills and schooling, and immediately and highly erroneously translate that to "only school can teach you skills, and it's impossible to self-teach", which is general and regrettably has little to do with whether one is schooled or not. Shades of grey, people, shades of grey.)
You will be receiving a bill for my services shortly.
--
BitTorrent in C -- LibBT
http://www.sf.net/projects/libbt
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.
Some of the best programmers have tried and no single company has been able to succed. The only way to make a protection system work would be to play the game from a central server and use password protection, fingerprint, retinal scan and DNA samples before you can begin playing.
Pirating has helped some companies in gaining market and mindshare. Sony and Playstation come to mind as does Commodore 64, amiga and the PC. They wouldnt have left the ground if it hadnt been so darn easy to copy the games and apps.Imagine buying all applications on a normal PC without linux?
Should the PS1 have been as successful if it hadnt been modchipped and games pirated? I dont think so and the same goes for the PC. Install a working copy protection and your user base flies off to another platform instead.
HTTP/1.1 400
For example:
Now I'm not accusing all these people of necessarily selling out, but obviously, if you work with a company, you're less likely to speak frankly about how much it sucks (if only because you have to take into account the interests your employees/shareholders).
Personally, I think its one of those reoccuring themes on slashdot.
"formal education in computers is bad"
And yet every so often there will be a news item on a basic principle of comp science which is taught during formal education, and it will be posted as "news". "Testing is good!" "People like whitespace???"
But what I really think underlying this is "programmer snobbery". A lot of the formal educated people cannot actually cut it as programmers in the field, and shift into the satellite jobs, such as proposal writing, testing, management etc...
Still, I think arrogance in programmers is one of the worst thing about computers though...
Why?
Seriously. Why? You're talking about Microsoft making money. We already know they do this in many ways, not all of which involve competing in a market dynamic on the basis of product quality. More relevantly, your specific point was, in the end they want to make money. There are other motives- wanting to work in a specific field, wanting to benefit the world, wanting to buy up the state of Washington and turn it into a nature preserve so geeks can go big game hunting with digital cameras- there are motives that involve DOING things or BEING things, positive things, negative things, whatever.
If the bottom line is no more than making the most money, they become a poster child for the ugliest repercussions of untrammeled, self-consuming capitalism. They have NO GOALS if that's all it is to them. They could just as well do it all with paper games on Wall Street and not even care what they're producing in terms of software (and in fact they are doing essentially that). They have no connection to the world apart from Hoovering money and 'valuation' from others and accumulating it, only to blow up when they can't maintain the expanding valuation.
I am serious. Why should I respect that in the slightest? Tell me something they want that's more than 'make money'. I don't care if it's 'control the entire world and replace governments'. That is evil and I still respect it more than the brainless, cancerous 'make money'. If you think 'make money' is enough, you haven't ever thought deeply about what you're doing, or what Microsoft is doing, or what capitalism is for. It's not an end in itself, it is a mechanism for society. Treated as an end in itself it is pathological.