Hacking the XBox

Peter Wayner writes: "If you're a handicapped Windows user, Microsoft offers suggestions and assistance -- but XBox users were out of luck until Andrew 'Bunnie' Huang finished his book Hacking the XBox. 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. But if you've got an urge to help the handicapped or any other reason to tinker with your XBox, buy this book before the Man sees through this ruse." Read on for the rest of Peter's review. Hacking the XBox author Andrew "Bunnie" Huang pages 288 publisher No Starch Press rating 9 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 1593270291 summary How and why to crack the seal on your 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.

Comments

What???

[flynt]

Would someone please explain in the "other English" simply what the summary of this article is trying to state? I have unusally high reading comprehension skills, but that paragraph has withstood repeated attempts on my part to retrieve any useful information from it!

Thanks in advance!

Re:What???

[sheriff_p]

For those of you who don't have to regularly deal with non-native speakers:

"Officially, Huang's excellent book is not about helping the differently-abled. That would be against the law."

Apparently helping the handicapped to use the xBox would be illegal (because of the DMCA, allegedly). That is why the book is called 'Hacking the xBox', and not 'Helping the handicapped use the xBox'.

"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."

The DMCA does allow some legal reverse-engineering (according to this), which is why Huang's book is meant to appear as a guide to that, rather than as a guide to (illegally) helping disabled people use the xBox.

"But if you've got an urge to help the handicapped or any other reason to tinker with your XBox, buy this book before the Man sees through this ruse."

So if you want to help the handicapped, or do other funky things with your xBox, buy this book, before Microsoft sues the author for helping the disabled.

Re:What???

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Yes, that is absolutely true, there is no exemption in the DMCA for reverse-engineering for the purposes of accessibility. If you are blind and the DRM on your new operating system doesn't explicitly allow you to transfer the contents of an e-book to a Braille or audio device, then you are screwed.

This in in contrast Australian version. which I know for sure allows such reverse-engineering, and the European version, which I am pretty sure allows it.

Looks like an interesting book.

[Meat Blaster]

Some of the stuff seems alright; putting a green LED on the XBOX instead of the blue one is pretty innocous. But I'm kind of wondering if he's trudging into the grey area with putting a real USB cable on.

It doesn't seem logical that we shouldn't be able to modify hardware that we buy, but from the business perspective these consoles are being sold at a loss -- if we can turn them into PCs, both the console manufacturer and the PC manufacturers are going to feel the hurt. Not that I'm arguing that the DMCA makes sense, 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.)

Re:Looks like an interesting book.

[realdpk]

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).

Re:Looks like an interesting book.

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

but from the business perspective these consoles are being sold at a loss -- if we can turn them into PCs, both the console manufacturer and the PC manufacturers are going to feel the hurt.

Tough.

If businesses feel that the best way to get your product out there is to give it away for less than actual cost, then that is their shoddy business plan (anyone remember :CueCat?).

Most grocery stores offer what are called loss-leaders, these are the items you see advertised in the weekly newspaper insert that shows 1 gallon of milk for $0.99 and 2 liter Colas for $0.99 each. The stores know that if you come in to buy those items, you'll probably pick up other items while you are there and they can make their profit on those items. Do we really need a law that requires you to purchase X number of non-loss-leaders every time you go to the store for a gallon of milk so the store can continue to sell milk below cost? Nope.

Most groceries (at least where I live) now require a $10 minimum purchase in order to take advantage of the loss-leaders (alocohol and cigarette purchases do not count towards the $10). There - they found a perfectly legal way to ensure they don't take a huge loss without requiring government intervention.

If Microsoft wants to continue to sell $500 computer for $180 under the assumption that you're going to come back to them for more software, then that is their problem.

Re:Looks like an interesting book.

[xonker]

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.

Re:Where do I get the mod chip?

[Hellraisr]

http://www.xbox-scene.com/ has EVERYTHING you need or want or even don't want to know about Xbox modding. Even schematics on how to make your own homebrew mod chip

Look, games don't *have* eyeballs.

[kahei]

A quadriplegic game could just look in the right direction and shoot.

This is a good example of the 'hey, I know what I mean, so if I string together a few kind of related words I'm sure you'll know what I mean too' school of self-expression that has done internet discussion so much good over the years :)

That or it's a a terrifying new plan to create games that can shoot back at you, even after you chop their limbs off.

Many war movies are saved

[MrFredBloggs]

"Many war movies are saved by the young private who (like Huang) is willing and able to tinker."

Although most are saved by extensive use of special effects, and bags of red liquid which splish and splash when detonated by small amounts of industrial explosive.

Re:Yeah, blind people playing

[dr_dank]

Video games. Uh, huh

If you think thats bad, I donated my old car to Federation for the Blind last month.

From the chewbacca-defense-book-reviews

[gosand]

Would someone please explain in the "other English" simply what the summary of this article is trying to state? I have unusally high reading comprehension skills, but that paragraph has withstood repeated attempts on my part to retrieve any useful information from it!

Yes, I can explain this review.

Ladies and gentlemen of the supposed jury, Chef's attorney would certainly want you to believe his client wrote Stinky Britches ten years ago, and they make a good case. Hell, I almost felt pity myself. But ladies and gentlemen of the supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, (pulls down picture of Chewbacca) this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it. That does not make sense...Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor with a bunch of two-foot-tall Ewoks. That does not make sense. But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case?...Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case...It does not make sense. Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen I am not making any sense. None of this makes sense. And so you have to remember when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No. Ladies and gentlemen of the supposed jury, it does not make sense. If Chewbacca lives on Endor you must acquit.

So buy this book. The End.

Re:Yeah, blind people playing

[dgoodman]

I had this next door neighbor once, who liked to come over to my apartment for two reasons: the first was to hit on cute girls, the second was to play our copy of "Punch-Out" on our vintage Nintendo. sometimes he would combine the two.
Invariably, he'd come over, sit himself down, and start playing Punch-Out. No one would really pay attention, because there was always someone playing the nintendo: it was something we were used to.
Eventually he would make it to Mike Tyson. This is where people would start paying attention; a murmur would rise up: "hey, he's about to beat the game again! let's watch!". And he'd beat Mike Tyson. Then whoever hadn't been to my apartment before would be informed that the player was totally blind, and he would either play the game again just to annoy the person, or hit on her if she was cute (how would he know, you ask? well, that's a different story. let's just say my friend was pretty damn smooth...)
Turns out Punch-Out provides lots of audio cues; since he wasn't distracted by the images on the screen, he was actually much better than most. He hated that most games' use of sound was of no use to the blind...

Would the real ruse please stand up?

[LostCluster]

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.

what on earth is this guy on about?

[aderusha]

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.

Writing books can *never* be against the DMCA

[autopr0n]

Back when the US had crypto export laws, the book applied cryptography could still be exported. Why? Because it was a book. The first amendment trumped any crypto export laws. It was only when the code was put on a computer that it became illegal.

In fact, the text of the DMCA EXPLICITLY allows you to DISCUSS the circumvention of copyright. It only becomes illegal when you apply the idea to a physical device (or, based on the DeCSS trial, a compiled computer program) and then distribute it.

A lot of people here seem spew random crap (like the completely non-sensical intro paragraph) about the DMCA without actually knowing that much about it(and the GPL, as we've seen in these SCO stories).

I mean, would it kill you people to read the thing?

My two cents

[inflexion]

That review sucked, but don't let it stop you from buying the book. I got my copy last week and can say it is definitely worth the money. It's a quick read (~2 nights) but will help you out with a lot of the basics of electronics that you never pick up in school or more formal textbooks. I don't even own an X-box nor do I plan on ever buying one and I still found this book interesting. Take that for what it's worth.

Re:My two cents

[silentmusic]

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.

What EULA?

[tkrotchko]

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.