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Hacking the XBox
There are many reasons why you might want to take apart your XBox, but one of the best ones I can imagine is making it easier for people who can't see, hear or move too well to play the same video games as the rest of us. Searching Microsoft's web site for documents containing both "handicapped" and "xbox" reveals only a suggestion for how to change the degree of difficulty of your Zoo Tycoon Game.
Someone who might want to retrofit a new pointing device or some other enabling gadget onto the XBox might start with the chapter describing how to fix a real USB cable onto the XBox. The chapter, like most in the book, is heavily illustrated with step-by-step pictures and instructions for clipping the cables in the right place and soldering them back together. Some of this might seem a bit rudimentary, but the detail can't hurt. In many cases, the real challenge is finding a way to take apart the case or the pack of wires in the right way. Smashing it isn't always an option. This is a book about mathematics, electronics, and taking apart plastic boxes.
Alas, just doing a bit of soldering isn't going to be enough unless you can make the right drivers. To help those who might want to reprogram their XBox, Huang devotes much of the book to stripping away the layers of the XBox security system, a story that is part mystery and part journey through the security layers in the system. The book is arranged in a very roughly chronological order. While it is mainly a book that teaches you how to reverse engineer the XBox, it is also a story of how he overcame the obstacles presented by the encryption. He talks as much about the unsuccessful paths as the ones that paid off. (This is, I think, an ideal model for the scientific community. It's much more educational than the terse papers that present the results as fait accompli.)
This part of the book quickly gets quite complicated, because Microsoft obviously tried hard to produce a secure machine that could provide a fair platform for people to play games. Getting the XBox to run any old software is not an easy task, but Huang describes several major techniques for drilling through the various layers of security. Again, he offers detailed pictures and instructions for construction special tools that snarf signals from a bus. Then he explains how he managed to grab the right keys for decrypting some of the most important data. Although it's a technical book, it unfolds like a spy novel.
The book is also very politically thoughtful. While the clueless will equate the word "hacking" in the title with piracy, money laundering, terrorism, and not phoning home on mother's day, Huang frames every step with a discussion of whether it is motivated by good or evil. He's not interested in building a tool to pirate XBox games and points out that many of the modifications aimed at running Linux on the Xbox do not help the pirates in any way. If anything, they make the games entirely unplayable.
Huang does want to defend the right to tinker, citing Ed Felten and others in a defense of something we're rapidly losing. I've heard horror stories from Army Majors about Windows PCs that refused to boot after failing to find a C drive. Do we really want to build machines that can't be retrofitted or fixed in the field? Many war movies are saved by the young private who (like Huang) is willing and able to tinker.
If you don't respond to pulls on the heartstrings, you might want to read one of the concluding chapters from the EFF's Lee Tien about the current legal climate. There are few exemptions for tinkering and many of them are limited. Reverse engineering is okay if you're a big corporation making a competing product, but that didn't help 2600 magazine when they were accused of trying to help people view DVDs on their Linux machine. I can only imagine what they would do to someone with very bad vision who wanted to enable a special zoom feature on their Xbox.
The book was originally going to be published by Wiley, but the company balked when it realized there were stiff legal penalties for helping handicapped people use computers. Even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology felt that it would be better for Huang to disassociate itself from Huang and his humanitarian efforts. The university only relented after pressure from a few good professors who helped the university understand the value in Huang's mission. Huang decided to publish the book himself with the help of his girlfriend, Nikki Justis. The two of them should be commended for turning out such a beautiful, professional book. If you're intrigued by the xbox, interested in helping the handicapped, or just trying to learn how to reverse engineer things before things get worse, check out this book. It's a wonderful contribution to the literature.
To close, I'm offering a pair of cool projects with the hope that Huang's book will inspire people to tinker:
- Sonic Information -- The sound in games like Quake is pretty good, but what if it was rendered with enough precision to let blind people grok the scene? The echoes from the tapping of a white cane already carry plenty of information to the blind. What if they could compete on an equal footing with the sighted? Who would win?
- Eye Movement Measuring tools -- Tools exist for sensing the position of our eyes. A quadriplegic game could just look in the right direction and shoot. Clearly some work would need to be done to encode all of the shift-left-left-down-right maneuvers from the games. This could help all of us. The thumb you save from repetitive motion injuries could be your own.
Note: Since this review was written, Hacking the Xbox has found a publisher in the form of No Starch Press. The original self-published version will probably be a sought-after collectable ;)
Peter Wayner is the author of Translucent Databases and ten other books. None rely on the DMCA. Hacking the Xbox is due in July at bn.com; you can also go directly to the book's page at No Starch Press. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Couldnt this have been reviewed by someone whos not a knee-jerk reactionary idiot? What a bunch of tripe.
Tip: If you wanted to develop some sort of controller for the handicapped, you can go right ahead - legally.
So all in all, is the book informative? Is there any neat technical information that would be of interest to anyone? Or is it a pseudo-politacal RMS-like diatribe about "big gub'ment and how Micro$oft is t eh suck".
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Also, nice to see the general 'hey, lets take advantage of the good nature people show towards the disabled to get our lame-ass X-Box cracks out' theme here. /. hits new low.
I would think that the Americans With Disabilities Act, combined with the many lobby groups for the disabled, would stomp all over anyone or any group attempting to block someone assisting the handicapped...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Except that Microsoft's goal (IMO) is not to move games to XBoxes. Sure, they want the XBox to sell well as a game console, but that isn't their true purpose behind the thing.
The XBox is, in reality, a "testing ground" for creating a computer that a user has no control over whatsoever.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I know what you're saying, but it becomes clear (er) upon reading the rest of the dreadful piece.
More life wasting content from Dashslot.
That was classic intercourse!
All products being sold can and probably will be modified by someone. If the company choses to sell their product at a loss, it's their own problem if they can't make up for that profit - not the general public's. We have no responsibility to them.
With regards to the IDE card - the company made a conscious decision to build a cheap RAID card that could act as a straight IDE card. Someone figured it out. Tough nuts to them - they made their choice. They could have, for only a little bit more cost, made the devices incapable of being both (on the IDE ones, the chips destined for the IDE-only boards could have been physically identical, but had the RAID portion zero'd out at the chip fab).
Well, selling it at a loss means that MS is slowly gaining a higher and higher game console market share. With Sony and Nintendo out of the way in a few years time, and a continued shift by game developers towards the Xbox platform instead of the PC, Microsoft will have created their own, controlled platform. Yes, the Xbox is just a PC, but maybe that will change... What about the next Xbox? With the ever-increasing popularity of the console, Microsoft is slowly making their dream come true; control of the hardware.
"humour is just logic dancing", as they say.
thanks, peter. that was really wonderful to read this morning.
Somehow, I think this book is more about hacking hiding under the ruse of helping the disabled than the other way around like the review implies.
The fact is, blind people can't play video games very well and nothing's going to really be able to fix that. I'm not sure what kind of hardware hack is gonna fix that. The avenue of having an first person shooter that can be played having sound give away the locations of other players for those who can't see video is really more of a challenge to the software developers... an off the shelf technology like QSound should make such a game possible, but would it be particularly playable is still unknown.
There's no need to hack the X-Box to make an eye-movement control. Pay your license fees to Microsoft and you can make almost any kind of controller you want, plug right into the front of the box without a "true USB" mod needed. BTW, for those of you who don't know, quadriplegics can't do hardware mods anyway for some strange reason.
The legal contraversy around this book has to deal with the ongoing fight over reverse engineering information from being publsihed. There's nothing contraversial about helping the disabled, and there's no stiff legal penalties for helping handicapped people use computers. The DMCA doesn't talk about handicapped people at all, but it has a lot to say about reverse engineering...
The book is called Hacking the XBox, not Helping Disabled People Use the XBox.
Do you wear a tin foil hat or an aluminum foil hat?
Seriously, though. If it's a testing ground for a computer that the user has no control over, we can breathe a sigh of relief. Only a couple of years after its introduction, and we can hack it to do all kinds of things we shouldn't.
And even if they are developing with Intel a perfect computer, one that you can't hack no matter what, it still wouldn't make a difference. You'll still be able to use your old computer to your heart's content, not to mention that AMD and other companies that Microsoft didn't contract with to make this UberKomputer will continue to make new x86 hardware that will still run Windows. And the bussiness sector will still continue to run Windows, at least for a few years. All of the sys admins that I know where I work would never let in a piece of hardware or software in that they coudn't modify. We have Novell security on our windows boxes, and we get regular hardware upgrades. All it would take is one virus that could target the UberKomputer and only the UberKomputer to convince bussiness that switching is a Bad Idea(TM), and that a diverse system is the best way to go.
but some of this information probably shouldn't be widely known (thinking of the IDE card that could be changed into a RAID card at one soldier point for 1/5th of the cost of the RAID card from the company.)
In a word: Bullshit. Manufacturers shouldn't be able to use the law to prop up bogus pricing schemes or to enforce their business plan. If they're selling the consoles at a loss, they take that risk -- the law shouldn't step in to enforce that so a manufacturer can make money. It's the responsiblity of the business to create a workable business plan. If someone can turn a Xbox IDE controller into a RAID controller "for 1/5 the cost of the RAID card from the company" then it means the company is seriously overpricing their cards.
The DMCA is increasingly being used as a way to defeat competition and enforce shoddy business practices -- not to uphold legitimate rights. If it continues, it won't be long before auto manufacturers are including chips to defeat third-party auto parts from working with their vehicles, and you can look forward to seriously inflated prices when you need to get new brake pads or whatever on your car because they'll be suing the competition out of business.
Taken to the extreme, I can see a day when you won't even be able to buy inexpensive replacement parts for household appliances -- motor burned out on your fridge? Too bad, buy a new one. Elements burned out in your oven? Hey, a new one from GE will only cost $300!
When you buy a product, it should be YOURS, period, end of story. If you want to mod your Xbox into a PC, and you have the skills to do it, then you damn well ought to be able to do so. Once you pay your $175 (or whatever they're going for) for an Xbox, Microsoft should cease to have any control over what you do with it -- save voiding the warranty if you decide to take it apart and start modding it.
ok, i preordered this book 3 months ago, and read it cover to cover the day it came in (great book btw).
not once did i notice any mention of accessibility. plenty of info on reverse engineerings, useful soldering tips, insight on IP law, and lots of other fascinating stuff - but nowhere does the author mention anything even remotely close to making the xbox usable to people with disabilities.
the author of this review asserts that "Don't be fooled by the title. Officially, Huang's excellent book is not about helping the differently-abled. That would be against the law. Huang was forced by the DMCA to hide his humanitarianism under the cloak of 'reverse engineering' because this is one of the few legitimate uses given a small amount of protection by the law."
i think maybe the reviewer is reading into the book what he wants to hear, and not what the damn book is about. (here's a hint: i starts with "r" and ends with "everse engineering").
claiming the Huang was forced by the evil minions of the DMCA to "hide his humanitarianism" by pretending that the book is really about reverse engineering is not only stupid, it's doing a disservice to one of the best books for beginning hardware hackers i've ever seen.
You can't just go modding your hardware to help the handicapped. That's not allowed. There are only a few very specific exemptions to the DMCA and even those exemptions haven't been upheld in court.
Consider the 2600 magazine case. They didn't publish DeCSS, they only linked to it. They claimed an exemption for hardware compatability. They were helping people view DVD's on a Linux machine. That exemption is written into the law. Yet, 2600 magazine lost.
So buddy. Do you want to try something that isn't exempted?
Helping the handicapped is NOT one of activities supposedly protected by the law.
Microsoft may (and this is debatable) be aiming for control over a trusted hardware platform. Applying Occam's razor suggests they want to lock down the Xbox to prevent piracy of their games.
Honestly: does anyone here believe a large company can build a secure system? Security (be it in hardware, software, or bricks) depends on human beings, and the larger the company the more weak links there are.
Microsoft cannot be so stupid as to actually believe a secure box is possible. It is not.
And... if it was... who cares? Hardware is a commodity and there will always be someone happy to build and sell a 'untrusted' platform.
Paranoia over trusted computing is OK, but don't forget that we're talking about corporations that are basically incompetent when it comes to security.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Sony and Nintendo will not be out of the way. Sony's next-generation console will be competitive - PS2 is after all still competitive with Xbox and at the moment still has more interesting games, though that will likely change soon enough what with the ease of Xbox porting. Meanwhile, Nintendo seems to be excellent at bringing out consoles which attract young and old gamers alike. I do think they screwed up when they brought out the gamecube with no DVD playing support. If you're going to use DVD technology, spend the ten bucks and give us DVD playback, we obviously want it. I think that hurt sales more than anything else you might say about gamecube, especially since all the consoles currently available have extremely similar controllers and are all in the same processing power and graphics ability neighborhood.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
1) "Xbox" is a pretty generic name (about as generic as "iPod" - but I'll leave that where its at). It doesn't really bring games to mind. A "PlayStation" and a "GameCube" definitely do, but an "Xbox?" They chose a generic name for a reason.
2) Both Xbox 1.5 and Xbox 2 are rumored to have PVR capability (Xbox/Ultimate TV, anyone?). There is talk of media center-like uses for the Xbox (yep - like the computers MS worked with HP on...embrace, extend, extinguish...). The Xbox is already a DVD and CD player, and Bill Gates has begun to make noise much the same to Steve Jobs's "digital hub" talk.
3) What's missing? A browser and e-mail...WebTV. Just drop some of that into the mix while you're at it...your Gamer Tag can be your "@xbox.net" e-mail address or somesuch...
With all of that, MS has its hands in your recreational and entertainment activities. They want to do so - just dig around, you'll find it.
MS wants all your base.
Published by Xenatera Press though, not No Starch whatever.
It's great, and relates a bit to what I was looking at recently - I'm a software guy who got sent a few scarey looking boards with FGPAs and stuff on them; I delegated the soldering iron though :-)
There is a chapter on the law which mentions how scarey it is getting these days, but the bulk of the book is about hardware, encryption and soldering, which was much more interesting than I thought the book would be when the girl persuaded me to buy the book. She had a lovely big display of them, and wished bunnie could have sent her a bigger poster.
It certainly filled a few gaps in my knowledge.
I'm a hardware engineer, and I was given this book by somebody (Thanks Jimi) who bought multiple copies to support "bunnie."
I basically skipped to the end because that's where he discusses some of the more interesting hardware hacking. I think that it's very well written and he offers some really useful advice. He even mentions details like why you don't necessarily want to use a heat gun to remove a part that has absorbed moisture.
I could offer a few little suggestions here and there (minor things like recommending Metcal soldering irons) but all-in-all he did a really good job.
Anyways I think that it's a good read for people that want to learn how to modify modern electronics equipment. Even if you're a EE major you'll probably learn some practical information by reading this book. If you're a software engineer that doesn't want to touch a soldering iron, then some parts may seem a bit baffling.
BTW: The Slashdot overview of this book is totally bizarre.
Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise.
I've heard horror stories from Army Majors about Windows PCs that refused to boot after failing to find a C drive.
Isn't this to be expected? Hell, I don't yank out /dev/hda in my linux box
and expect it to boot either.
Computers 101: If an OS expects to find operating files in a certain location, removing that location is going to confuse the operating system bigtime when booting.
Windows does boot from primary-master, primary-slave, secondary-master, and secondary-slave HDD positions. (I'll test with SCSI as soon as someone donates some new hardware). What more do you want?
Next week: Criticizing cars because some refuse to run without gasoline. *Gasp!*
I bought an X Box for my 8 year old son 18 months ago.
I didn't agree to any EULA when I bought it. He opened it for Xmas and started playing games.
Honestly, I never heard of any EULA. How can I be bound by something I never agreed to? Did my Son agree to a EULA? I don't think so, it never asked him "Do you agree, blah blah blah". And even if it did, how could a court hold an 8 year old to a contract that (a) He didn't understand (b) More importantly, he's not an adult.
I don't believe I'm bound to any EULA. In fact, looking at the box right now, there's no EULA on the outside. So what EULA do you mean? There is none as far as I can see.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you