Slashdot Mirror
X-Box Private Key Challenge Ended
powerlord writes "The Neo Project (mentioned in a recent slashdot article) recently stopped its bid to recover the X-Box private key citing legal reasons: "Due to legal reasons, we will no longer be hosting or participating in the xbox challenge." DCers.com, a site devoted to distributed computing sheds some light on Neo's sudden flip-flop with a blurb claiming that: "... many legitiment DC'ers that have been working this project since it started that have decided to quit because of the new Neo client that also tries to crack the X-Box encryption." and that they believed this might ultimately kill The Neo Project."
I mean, they HAD been working for a few days. Perhaps they got the key! :-P
"Yeah. We, um. Well. We're going to stop now. And cite an obvious legal reason, though we ignored that same reason when we first started. Because we wanted the key. But... now we don't. Or something. Look, I don't care, explain it to yourself. Just know that we've stopped, and are happy. Ok? Ok. Good. Now, onto other news..."
Informatus Technologicus
"Anybody else automatically assume that it had ended because they found the key?"
While I'm not sure this is probable, I will agree that not posting the legal threat is highly unusual. They need to distribute a copy if only for posting on ChillingEffects.org. Also, my first call would be to the EFF. But I guess some people stick more firmly to their principles than others...
One thing that indicate the level of professionalism of these people is that the Neo client is written in VisualBasic (check their forums for reference, last night it was _so slow_ that I don't bother linking the thread here). VisualBasic has uses but not here I'm afraid. Yeah, why not lock out all the *nix clusters with cool admins that are the biggest contributors to distributed cracking projects by letting their clusters crack stuff when they otherwise would be idle. I guess they were developing a new portable client from the scratch with C... But still, no sympathy from me.
--this is an interesting case. I am reluctant to use the old cars and computers analogy, but it's appropriate here. For decades and generations car companies have come up with innovations and released a product that they own, then sell. It has shape, size, presence, features, etc all unique to that comapny, and covered by various laws of ownership and some laws on use, but still a lot of leeway. And for the same amount of time guys have decided that these products needed "souping up" and customiizing and modifying, and it's all been mostly legal. You can take a car, moidify it heavily and still drive on the public road following a set of road use laws, but you can still drive completely different if you want to on your own property or someone elses property-say a race track-in any manner you wish to. They did it for their own reasons which aren't revelant, make it go faster, make it travel on roads not envisioned as the primary road the designers were aiming for (think heavy off road mods), make it look nicer or whatever.
Seems like more than ample past case law to make hardware modding "legal". In the cars cases it might have required the hotrodder to completely disassemble the entire car, see how every single part worked and how it was designed, then decide how they wanted to do it better or different to suit their needs. It's more than legal, it's commonplace and no one thinks twice about it, it's a huge business and millions of people do it as a hobby.
Microsoft is seeking to become a huge exception to the past rules, as are a slew of other computer hardware and software companies. They can't have it both ways, if they actually are selling a product, then said product must be covered by a consumer warranty, and last I looked microsoft insists their products are as-is, no warranty unless they deem to do allow it at their leisure, ie, the "designed software" and "hard coded into the hardware" part. It's one or the other, if they want all the rights of a sellable consumer product, then they must accept normal useability warranties that are applied to every other "product" out there, and they most definetly DON'T accept that, so the courts should tell them (and ALL those other companies that insist on propietary excuslivity "rights" to their warez) to get stuffed until they do. As to modding the hardware itself, it's the same, either you get to OWN a piece of stuff or you don't, you can't half own something. Case precedence should have been set a long time ago, but it wasn't, now it's a big ole mess because it's become entrenched into computer-dom that they can have their cake and eat it too, something no other product has, and only one private business in the US currently enjoys (outside utilities and that gets into what is a utility), and that's major league baseball, which is goofy enough but exists.
I'm sure cracking their key violates their acceptable use policy as well as any other license you implicitly agree to when you use the product.
But what if you do not own an X-Box? Surely they cannot bind you to their contract if you have nothing to do with them; at least not morally. I'm not entirely sure what the laws state in America.