Slashdot Mirror
Aussie Company Releases Xbox Mod-Chip Designs
An anonymous reader submits: "According to an article in the Australian Financial Review, An Australian computer chip designer will this weekend risk the wrath of Microsoft by making its sophisticated Xbox mod-chip designs freely available over the internet.
This release is the second and most advanced design to date that has been released by this company, the earlier release of a much simpler design was covered by a previous article on slashdot.
Go get'em while they're hot everyone. When you consider what has been happening to companies who irritate console makers, these files might not be around for long!" The AFR article requires subscription, but the AussieChip site has more information, including a link to the terms under which the designs may be downloaded -- looks like they're looking for some dedicated amateurs ;)
why not? you paid the money for it. MS is just pissed because they're losing out on the money people are paying to mod it up... or are they?
This post was brought to you by the number 584811 and the characters / and .
Dude, just forget about it. Your project is useless. Cracking the key is computationally impossible unless you have a few billion years at your disposal.
Methinks voiding the warranty will not be a problem by the time the project finishes.
Remember Distributed.net? Aka, the guys who took years(and years...) to prove how easily they could crack RC5 given all that distributedcomputing power? :-)
Please help metamoderate.
Hate to break it to ya, but the DMCA doesn't apply in Australia... it's an American law...
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Microsoft stock is up was up yesterday. Actually it is up 3 points since June 6. Your plan to bankrupt Microsoft seems to be failing. I would also point out that NOT buying the Xbox wouuld be an even greater loss to Microsoft.
What's even funnier is that their latest game - Brute Force - is doing very well. Since games are where they make their profit I would say that you and your "X-Box purchasing community" are pretty damn stupid.
Dude, it's a distributed computing project. Theoretically, with enough computers, it could be done in a few years.
Well okay, it would have to be something like a couple of stadiums filled with dual processor 3Ghz systems running full-time, but hey, they just might get lucky. They don't have to search the entire keyspace in order to find the right key.
Ron Paul 2012
Yes, but violators better be aware of the DMCA if they ever plan to visit the U.S, remember Dmitry Sklyarov?
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
The point of good crypto systems is that despite knowing the public-key, crypto-code, plain text and encrypted text, you cannot determin the private key used to encrypt it easially.
A mod chip is a lot easier to produce, because the xBox by design uses mostly off the shelf componants that anyone can buy. MS replced one chip (the BIOS) with one they modified to require some encryption (amoung a lot of other thing different from a normal bios). Take their BIOS out and put in a standard one and you have a standard PC. (More or less, MS used a lot of parts not normally on a PC, and in any case a BIOS has to be changed for each different chipset)
I doupt it. The private key is a PRIME number, and by multiplying by 5 you by definition eliminate all chances of finding the private key. So if you ever get the private key it means that your calculator got a wrong result. This could happen in the case of radiation striking at the right time, but I have never seen a calculator give a wrong result so the odds are extreemly rare.
The modchip simply replaces the xbox bios with a cracked bios that doesn't check for valid signatures. In hardware. I don't see how this reflects on or even barely implicates anything about the strength of the encryption Microsoft uses.
Wow, I guess that, if you've ever been here, you explored Oz from the comfort and 'realism' of a tour bus?
You wait till you see heards (?) of kangaroos moving away at speed-its like a flock of starlings...not flying though of course!
Also to see an emu run is amazing.
Yellow wattles, red bottle brush, flocks of white and yellow cockatoos, red, green and blue lorikeets, grey and pink galahs, don't mention the colours of budgie's, wombats, echidnas, the platypus, the list goes on mate. If you think most of Australia is 'barren' you're a sixpack short of a slab/kangaroos loose in the top paddock. Etc Troll?