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Hackers Dodge Xbox Live Shutout
An Ars Technica post at their games column Opposable Thumbs points out that, despite Microsoft's best efforts, hacked Xbox 360s are once again playing on Xbox Live. "Steadfast in their pursuits, the hackers of the Xbox 360 scene have managed to best Microsoft's Xbox Live Banning protocol: a system of checks in place to identify hacked Xbox 360s and deny them access to the Xbox Live Network. The current method of hacking the 360 involves exploiting the firmware of the DVD drive (the preferable method), and this latest patch does just that. In fact, the creators are so confident in their breakthrough that the info file remarks that the new firmware 'defeats all current and some future Xbox Live detection attempts.'"
The person you are about to shoot may be playing on a hacked xbox, Do you want to continue?
The hackers have more manpower than Microsoft. It's also worth noting that they're probably more skilled than the XBL engineers.
Even if Microsoft had 1000 people working on this, the hackers would still be ahead. It's impossible to estimate how many people take a shot at console hacking just for the hell of it.
Inevitably, the hackers dominate just about any platform. That's just the way it works.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
Uh, I assume if anyone can get this firmware then so can Microsoft. Their next update just won't use a method fixed by this hacked firmware.
As far as I know, the mod in question only allows users to play "backups" of games - not to run arbitrary code (including cheats). So the concerns of people cheating are a little off the mark. As is the idea that the detection could really be moved to the server side - any detection regimen is going to have to look at the drive's firmware or some characteristic of the disk and this looking is going to be done at the client end.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
People with hacked Xbox 360s still need to buy a new system in order to play online. So it's really not all that bad for Microsoft. When they defeat _this_ hack, then all people with those hacked boxes would have to buy yet another Xbox. What would really screw up Microsoft's banning efforts is if people managed to change their console IDs. Then banning a console ID would put a regular Xbox 360 out of commission, and the banned one would just change to a different good ID again.
It's good to read the hackers are continuing to fight for our rights to not only pirate (yeah, I know there are a lot of anti-pirate people here, I don't blame them one bit for being steadily opposed) games, but get access to the online community through a modded system. I've always wanted a modded console, but I know if that were to happen I would end up buying pratically nothing brand-new other than like maybe one or two games a year total across my systems, and I own every sytem except the wii. Even if I had to buy every single game I play from here on out, I have so many games to play waiting for me collecting dust or taking up HD space, I can easily wait for 90% of what comes out to drop in price or pick of used 6 mo to a year later for a signifigant fraction of what they cost new. If everyone was like me buying almost exclusively used or playing a lot of emulated retro titles, or even like the hardcore hacker/pirates (that don't buy anything at all anymnore cause they don't have to) the industry would change so much it would be hard to recognize. On the same hand, Pirates of the Carribean 3 the game will probably sell like ten times the numbers of copies sold of Psyconauts and Shin Megami Tensei 3 combined, so go figure..but I digress, pirating/hacking/modding will not be the death of the industry-just a continued challenge, and I love to read a bout a good digital brawl, being on the edge fringes of modding/piracy/emulation/backup stuff from decades ago to now.
Gaming for over 25 years
We're seeing Trusted Computing at its finest.
Trusted Computing: noun
The act of trusting that any possible attack vector against a computers expected behavior will be done so by those that have nothing better to do than to game the system.
Bye!
I've heard that line before. Weren't the last firmware hacks designed to be "undetectable by Microsoft"?
PS3 - free online, dedicated servers, 32, 40 player games
I assume that this will remain a theoretical maximum until such time as the 32nd PS3 is actually sold?
Huh weird my GoW multiplayer perfect...my Cod3 (24 people) no issues...so either your connection sucks or you are talking out your ass.
PC - free online, dedicated servers, 32, 64 player games in which you will get owned by cheaters
PS3- free online, dedicated servers, 32, 40 player games in all of which you will get owned by cheaters
Halo 3 - 16 player p2p laggy mess no cheaters
Before you tried to pass that pathetic bullshit off you should have gotten the countless other Gears of War players crying over the lag and exploit problems that plague the game to keep their mouths shut and stop whining about it all over the net...
Even if you haven't experience just how shitty the game is online you can just google "Gears lag" to see for yourselves.
So you're in the "You're paying for it, so it must be good" camp.
It's no easier to cheat on a PS3 game than it is to cheat on an Xbox 360 game. Both systems are pretty well locked down (the PS3 more than the Xbox 360 at the moment - it is possible to run arbitrary code on an Xbox 360, but that still won't help you cheat).
Most of these arguments are bogus.
Complaints of them being laggy are anecdotal at best, exaggerations in general. I've played XBL since crimson skies was available on the original - normally on a comcast or better connection. Sometimes I have a laggy connection, but that's only if the game I'm playing uses a wrong/bad algorithm for picking a host or if the host becomes laggy after it's been picked.
Instead, a large portion of the games I play have so much going on, lag is the last thing I'm thinking about.
Indeed, the benefits of XBL over free-for-all networks are more than just a connection, mostly it's trueskill or some variant that games implement. If I'm a level 20+ player in halo2/cod3, etc. I'm all but guaranteed to play similarly leveled people. This means I'm not subject to my teammates/opponents fucking around (team killing, lagging, quitting, or other forms of douchebaggery) near as much as some free for all. I get to play with highly skilled people, AGAINST highly skilled people, and have fun.
Old Modded Xbox users?
:(
A cheap Media box was too hard to resist but now no live
so you're basically saying: PC - lots of games PS3 - lots of games Xbox360 - only one game and it's not even out yet...
So let's get this straight...
The PS3...
Which has free online play for all games...
Which has dedicated servers for all of its major games...
Which has a launch game running with 40 players, dedicated servers, universally acclaimed to be utterly lagfree, and rock solid framerate even with 40 people games...
Which has a fucking PSN downloadable game with 32 players, both dedicated and user servers...
Which is selling at a rate that is right between the 100+ million selling PS1 and 115+ million selling PS2...
Let me give you some advice Xbot, stay away from sales comparisons when your system is selling at a slower rate than the 23 million selling Xbox.
And you probably should keep your mouth shut about reliability jokes...
And system power too...
And backwards compatibility is a no no...
Hell, 360 owners would best just to sit home for the next five years and cry silently to themselves over the crappy Forza 2 and Halo 3 graphics.
"So you're in the "You're paying for it, so it must be good" camp."
The pathetic Xbox fans dumb enough to pay 50 dollars a year to play online always end up sounding like that old Brian Regan routine:
"THE ONE IN THE MIDDLE IS THE SUN!!"
"That's nice, what are the other planets?"
"THE BIG YELLOW ONE IS THE SUN!"
"XBOX LIVE TEH BEST CUZ WE PAY 50 DOLLARS A YEAR FOR IT!!"
"That's nice, why does it have worse online gaming then every other platform?"
"XBOX LIVE TEH BESTEST CUZ WE PAY 50 DOLLARS A YEAR FOR IT!!"
Actually games have had dedicated servers. Battlefield modern combat comes to mind specifically.
You mad
So a port of a single pc game by EA is the only game with dedicated servers on the 360?
And Microsoft's main first party games like Halo and Gears of War are crappy P2P. You are paying 50 dollars every year for what again?
You should probably look into paying someone to remove the sand from your vagina.
- 388,040 Halo 2 Games (Last 24 Hours)
- 187,710 Halo 2 Players (Last 24 Hours)
- 43,300 Players Online in Halo 2
- 256,844 Halo 3 Games (Last 24 Hours)
- 144,359 Halo 3 Players (Last 24 Hours)
- 23,588 Players Online in Halo 3
The maximum number of players in a game of Halo is 16. So that's at least 4,180 games of Halo being played right this very moment. This is only for Halo 2 and 3, it does not include any other xboxlive games. So, how much money do you think Microsoft would need to run all of xboxlive on dedicated servers with appropriate amounts of bandwidth?
Click for even more terrifying numbers.
187,710 * 50 dollars a year = 9,385,500 dollars a year people are paying Microsoft to be able play online.
Over 4 or 5 years that's 40-50 million dollars just for people playing Halo 2.
Perhaps they could find the money in there? Microsoft's online service is the biggest ripoff in gaming history.
Dude. security > hacking. this is just retarded design made product by retarded management.
"I want the head of marketing to design the security model by thursday or chairs will fly."
doing console based software checks to determine validity on the network: priceless.
PS: Bill, fire them all. Get back to work. I'll put coffee on. We'll beat this thing.
You must be the same guy as the one from up above.
Take the stick out of your ass, slashbot.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Console fanboys are too easy to troll. Try something more difficult.
I mostly play on a server that's aggressively monitored for cheaters, so when a cheater's caught (happens almost daily) a can see how good I am comparing to him. The cheaters routinely get owned by me, and I'm just a mediocre player. Perhaps if you move from mindless shooting to more advanced tactics you'll experience the same effect?
what's the 32 player PSN download game? I live in Europe, so we're a bit behind on PSN content.
According to vgchartz the ps3 is on track with the ps2 (http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=PS®1=All &cons2=PS2®2=All&cons3=PS3®3=All&align=1)
I wouldn't joke about Backward compatibility on either the PS3 or XBox360(I am a pal gamer). Neither has the full range of games playing like the wii(gc)
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st
I found 10 pages of games at http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/catalog.aspx?WT.sv l=nav
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st
It is _not_ impossible to cheat, you can modify ini files to do it.*
I know that PGR3 and Gears of War being hacked in such a way its quite possible there are many more games.
Now this still may just be an excuse from MS though quite frankly they dont really need one, virtually the only other purpose of a modchip is piracy.
Either way cheating _is_ possible it _has_ been done and banning the modders _will_ stop it regardless of why you really think they have started the bannings.
*There may be other files you can use as well I cant say ive looked in to it much which is why im amazed at how many people claim to be knowledgable about these things yet seem to have missed the fact that there have been super supercars in PGR3 for months.
do this with the hack?
~Vexed and loving it!
They deserve that kind of curses.
tychus
A couple of things:
1) To re-iterate what others are saying, the firmware hack does not defeat executable signatures, so the integrity of game code has not been compromised, however, game data files can be, and have been, compromised (Exo's GoW hacks). The simple solution is to update the executable with hard-coded data file checksums to go along with their weak signature security (in this case, on the GoW data files). So it's not entirely true that the firmware hack doesn't allow cheaters - but Microsoft has other avenues they can pursue in preventing cheaters. This wave of bannings represents an escalation in Microsoft's policy toward modders.
2) Something that many here miss, is that Microsoft has no direct access to the firmware for some models of the DVD drive they are using. Toshiba-Samsung MS28 drives, for example, have "Firmguard" - an attempt to thwart modders that has backfired on Microsoft. Why? Because powercycling the DVD with the correct VIA SATA chipset bypasses Firmguard as part of it's "Bad Flash" recovery mode. Microsoft cannot do this on the 360. This means they cannot read, nor write firmware to these drives.
There were several techniques Microsoft employed against modders in this last wave, verified by special debugging firmware employed - Microsoft was using an anomaly in the firmware's fetch of special sectors to determine if backups were employed (moddded Hitachi drives gave up the goods on this one), as well as more strict checking of those sectors (catching non-"stealth" backups), and finally, using Challenge/Response commands to do threshold timing (many used slower or faster timings on the firmware, which was detectable as being outside of thresholds).
There are still less reliable checks Microsoft may employ, but that dragnet will scoop up some legitmate users, too (No DVD Error code check, used to see who's been using their Xbox 360 as a power supply for the drive as they flashed it). If I was on the team, I'd rule that one out. There are a few other techniques, which I won't mention, since they haven't been discussed publicly, as the others I mentioned have (besides, Microsoft KNOWS how they are checking currently) - which have been identified and "fixed" in the current iXtreme 1.0 firmware.
For what it's worth, many, many 360 modders have NOT been banned. It may be these checks were only performed when they were actively playing a backup on Live... no pattern has emerged, and much of the data is suspect (panicky users, usual liars, etc...).
If Microsoft wants to defeat cheaters, all they need to do is employ a couple of interns to surf the scene sites for hack news, then simply order up special bannin' updates for those hacked games, to detect cheater's data files and ban those specific machines. Future game releases could incorporate some security libraries to make data files more secure (the code currently cannot be hacked).
Oh, man, we clearly play different games. I only play team tactics games (mostly team skirmish in the Halo 3 Beta lately), but the fact remains that you can't tell an aimbot from world's best players. I don't mind getting owned by the latter, but the former really pisses me off, because the cheaters are also the most annoying teammates and opponents.
I'll pay 50 bucks for the network with no cheaters. As others have said, I really wish they'd host the games themselves, but at least you can filter people by country and connection and your basic standby attack will get you banned.
That said, cheating has different effects on different games. In Halo 2, you can just make people die automatically as they spawn, thus ruining the game. Of course this is not the most egregious form of cheating, because it's obvious. The worst for me is the guy who snipes you every time, as you try to get close to him but are too far away to use any other weapon. Is he an aimbot or just really good? Who knows?
I play Call of Duty. First of all, PunkBuster does a good job on catching an aimbot, and second, aimbot users are so naive that you're almost always behind their back... unless you run around mindlessly shooting anyone on sight...