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 ;)
"When I buy my xbox I should be able to do whatever I want with it, yada, yada, yada...."
seems the past few articles involving Australia on /. have been about them restricting rights.
This post was brought to you by the number 584811 and the characters / and .
Whoever controls the language of the debate controls the debate. (see "sharing" vs. "stealing")
Can we start calling these "linux-enabling" chips or something equally positive, something that shows that they are NOT primarily designed to circumvent copyright?
Slashdot will surely keep this site down for a while to come!
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Slashdot away: http://www.hysma.com/xbox/
Got some spare cycles and want to piss-off billg? Follow the link in my current sig. (The site is running outside DMCA-land, no worries.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If Microsoft doesn't want anyone to see these designs, they need only bring the site to its knees with a flood of traffic, generated by a well-placed article on highly-viewed website.
oh... wait...
Anyways, I am writing you today to inform you that your wonderful copyright protection and region protection schemes have been broken. I request that you save the entire community some time next model and just forget the entire copyright idea all together. We want to play with our X-Box's the same as we want to play with our toasters, but you don't see GE breathing down our necks when we do it.
Sort of a word to the wise if we buy it, and we're bored, we're going to screw around with it. Anyways I hope you have a wonderful day monopolizing the Operating System industry and ignoring the supreme court.
Lots of love,
Everyone.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Hate to break it to ya, but the DMCA doesn't apply in Australia... it's an American law...
5468652047616D65
"When you consider what has been happening to companies who irritate console makers, these files might not be around for long!"
Not true. Thanks to one of the benefits of the Internet, now that this information has been released and has been covered by the major geek media, there will be enough people who will download it so that the information will live on for a long, long time.
I think its obvious what course of action needs to be taken: Ban computers. Computers are responsible for almost 100% of DMCA violations: These tools of outlaws come in several categories:
-Personal computers:
these remain the no.1 tools of criminal "hackers" allowing them to propogate virii and pirate material and to violate the DMCA
-General purpose processors and microcontrollers:
these are used as mod chips, clearly tools that are used to violate the DMCA
-The internet (another by-product of computers):
is responsible for allowing numerous DMCA and copy right violations including the spreading of mod-chip plans, pirate material, and George W. Bush jokes.
Im serious, i can guarentee that once personal computers are banned there will be atleast an 80% drop in the number of DMCA violations! If you dont think banning personal computers is a law that can be enforced then think again: There exist large databases of computer owners sourced from retail shops, online stores, credit card transactions, software licenses and ISP's. Personal computers also emit an EMF at the frequency of their internal clock, these can be detected and categorised - higher frequencies usually denote more powerful and therefore more illigal computers. Its true that there are legitimate uses for computers, but in this case they should be restricted to government use only.
Let me leave you with a thought: Terrorists also use computers!!!!!!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Whoa whoa, you mean America doesn't rule the world yet? Dubya, send some troops and wrangle up a kangaroo or two.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Here is a clue boat for you (in easy to understand baby talk):
1 - Microsoft is manufacturer. They sell box to stores. Store sell box to you.
2 - Microsoft make same amount of boxes whether you buy one of not. All the Linux geeks in the world couldn't affect demand enough to change that.
3 - When you buy a box your money goes to the store you bought it from. They actually make a profit.
4 - Microsoft sells games to stores. Stores sell to other Xbox customers.
5 - If Xbox does well then stores stock up on Xbox games. Microsoft gets paid whether you buy the game from the store or not.
I am tired of typing like that. The point is that you are a moron if you think that you are getting a good deal at the same time you are wripping off Microsoft. For the same amount of money you could build twice as good of a box and not have to hack it.
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
"these files might not be around for long"
you can't unring a bell.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
If anyone actually gets ahold of this, despite the inevitable heavy slashdotting it will receive, please mirror it on Freenet! It's very hard to censor a network with no servers, no administrators, and no controlling entity. ;) If the Powers That Be don't want you corrupting your mind with impure knowledge, then such material belongs on Freenet!
If you're not familiar with the Freenet project, take look: Users donate bandwidth and space by running a "node", and the network's content exists in the collective datastore shared by thousands of nodes.
Data is duplicated as it's retrieved, so popular content gets more redundantly distributed. Node-to-node communications are encrypted, and so is the content in each datastore. You don't know and can't control what's on your own node.
The usual interface to Freenet is a web browser, since web pages and images can be easily inserted into the network. Other types of data (music, movies, programs) are common, and front-end programs exist to facilitate large uploads and downloads.
Check out Freenet, run a stable node, and play with it! The more you use it, the faster it gets. Bandwidth is more important than space; if you can host a node on something faster than a dialup it would be nice.
Oh, and here's the cool thing about Freenet that makes it perfect for things like modchip designs: Once inserted, content cannot be forcibly removed. Even the creators of the network can't delete something from it. The only way content falls out of freenet is if everyone ignores it.
No, but their politicians can be bought by foreign companies. It's all good.
Look around the site. Look for any info they may be an industry standard gerber file.
Gerber files are what is sent to a photoplotter to make the masks for etching printed circuit boards. They are standard across the industry, coming in two flavors, RS-174D and RS-174X, which differ mostly in how the aperture tables which define pad and trace sizes and widths are implemented.
Protel's software is a graphics editor for making and editing printed circuit board manufacturing files, so there may be other editors that might be able to read it.
If you are unable to open the PCB files, most likely you may have to lay out the circuit board yourself if you wanna make one.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
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)
Check out this
http://warmcat.com/milksop
Thats the REAL creator of the CheapMod, Andy Green.
This news is NOTHING new as cheapmod information has been around for more than a 8 months.
If your going to post an article of this maginituted, do some research first.
To the guy who wants to see them on Linux ... good luck. Do you know any decent (ie usable) Linux PCB editing software? If so please post details!
Dmitry Sklyarov was charged with breaking US laws *in* the US -- selling his company's software while physically the US.
May we never see th
The reason for regional restrictions is to allow the companies to impose price discrimination. The idea is that you want to charge any one person as much as they are absolutely willing to pay before going someone else. Normally, you have to set a single price -- if you charged the wealthy citizens of the US more for Super Mario Brothers 5, someone would just import Indian copies sold cheaply. However, if you can break up the world into incompatible regions, you can charge a much closer value to what people are willing to pay in each region. Basically, this tends to be a good thing for very poor countries (as long as the game/movie actually comes out in their region), since they have to pay less, and bad for wealthy countries. It tends to irritate customers, who are directly impacted by compatibility issues, and don't directly see cost differences.
Also, AFAIK, region coding has not been successfully argued in court to be considered a form of copy protection, and hence is not covered under the DMCA. The reason region free hardware DVD players aren't commonly sold in the US any more is because the DVD Consortium can exert pressure on their licensees, not because it's against the law.
May we never see th