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$2,000 Bounty For Open Source Xbox Kinect Drivers
ptorrone writes "Open source hardware company Adafruit Industries is offering a $2,000 bounty for the first person or group to upload driver code and examples under an open source license to GitHub for the Xbox Kinect released yesterday. The Kinect sensor outputs video at a frame rate of 30Hz, with the RGB video stream at 32-bit color VGA resolution (640×480 pixels), and the monochrome video stream used for depth sensing at 16-bit QVGA resolution (320×240 pixels with 65,536 levels of sensitivity). The open hardware group would like to see this camera used for education, robotics and fun outside the Xbox."
The bounty was originally $1,000, but Microsoft's dour response induced Adafruit to double it. ("With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.") In addition, the Xbox 360 dashboard update that preceded Kinect's launch contains upgraded anti-piracy restrictions.
Is reverse engineering for interoperability purpose still legal ?
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Presumably there is cryptographic authentication here that needs to be broken. Sounds like some student's differential power analysis school project is about to get a bit more lucrative... and legally risky...
Tamper-resistant? You mean, they're trying to stop me from using it the way I choose. Like how the screwdriver manufacturers add elements to the steel to make it so that I can't sharpen the end and make a pin-punch from it? Jeeesh!! What arrogance.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Once you sell one to me, it's my product, morons.
What the hell, are these X-ray machines or something with radioactive material in them that would sicken the user if he opened it up?!? I had better be sure thisn't some strange dream.
Whatever happened to people selling devices to other people, so they could use them as they see fit?
Not providing drivers fro other systems, fine, whatever you like, not your responsibility. Working with law enforcement to prevent 'product tampering?
Screw you MS, really.
Is it me or is 2000$ kinda cheap to hire someone with the expertise required to extract out kinect's source?
Of course if this happened, sales of Kinect sensors would go up without sales of Kinect video games going up... and since MS is actually *losing* money on these sensors, suddenly the price of Kinect sensors would go up...
BS.
I am not licensing this product. Your not renting it to me. I am not leasing it. I am buying it, and I'll do with it what I damn well please.
Twenty or thirty years ago these things were somewhat neat. Now they are corporate mole-hunts. The engineers who designed the platform already have plenty of drivers, written in ten different languages, and probably have software emulators to run in VMs with any of a dozen different kernels.
What they are doing is mining the community. If anything _really_ good or novel comes up they'll just take it in house, sit on it for a few months, and promptly edge out the submitter--that is standard corporate policy and is the default game played against research associates in any field. As an added bonus if any of the submissions look, smell, feel, or even sound like anything even remotely related to one of those dozens of software drivers that they already have in house then all they need to do is look at friend-of-a-friend links to see who in the research teams is "taking the work home" with them.
Reality 101.
On what grounds can Microsoft even begin to claim any sort of right to restrict reverse engineering this product?
If they are hoping to invoke the DMCA for circumventing a content protection mechanism, I'd like to point out that these things are essentially a couple of cameras and a mic shoved in a plastic housing. Any content captured by these cameras is, in no uncertain terms, mine as it is me 'performing' in front of them.
Culture is more than commerce
On one hand, yes, it is a hardware. You are please to use it as you see fit.
On the other hand, the key to Kinect is not the hardware components itself, rather it is the embedded code that brings everything together, process the data, and make the whole thing work. To that end they do have right to safeguard their code and software design to keep anyone from knowing exactly what they are doing, and how they are doing.
So I think it is not wrong if someone figured it all out by themselves how to use those components or use Kinet in its entirety in other purpose besides connecting to XBox. But I would venture to guess that whoever attempts to extract the code internal to the device would be subject to legal action, and like it or not, Microsoft's litigation would be legitimate.
Hardware-wise, Kinect isn't anything particularly special - basically few mics, simple visible light webcam, two stereoscopically arranged IR ones (take out IR filter from an ordinary webcam, replace it with non-exposed part of photographic film) capturing projected light pattern, very limited tilting.
Everything very interesting and useful happens on the CPU of X360...
It's not merely a case of drivers, you'd need highly specific software anyway. Might as well use 2 inexpensive webcams.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Regardless of the business model, there is no place for this aggressive rhetoric. Microsoft needs to understand that when they sell someone a piece of hardware, it is no longer Microsoft's to control outside of allowing it on their network or not.
Good-bye
Microsoft is losing money on these Kinect units
^this one is really one of those [citation needed] cases
One that hath name thou can not otter
How can it possibly hurt Microsoft if there are customers who want to purchase and repurpose their hardware for something other than playing a game?
Which do you think is more in Microsoft’s best interests, selling a bunch of high-tech electronics in a molded plastic case for $150, or selling a piece of stamped plastic for $40?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Okay, I honestly forgot. Did Nintendo flip out when people started developing PC drivers for the Wii remote? I don't seem to recall them raising hell over someone making drivers for their controllers (and Nintendo WOULD be the ones to do so), but Microsoft is doing that for what is effectively a couple cameras?
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
>MS said they dropped doing the heavy processing on Kinect itself...
There is still that arm processor. It's being used for something. It could be used for something different.
> so I just checked - it's 512 megabits
Thats still too much for buffer. 512 megabits is 64 megabytes. Still more likely that it's for processing
We are arguing about symantics. my point is: This is more then just a couple webcams and a couple of mics. We could debate about the symantics till the cows come home, but at the end of the day there are no hardware solutions that quite reproduce what the kinect does. It's worth hacking.
Microsoft needs to understand that when they sell someone a piece of hardware, it is no longer Microsoft's to control outside of allowing it on their network or not.
That's just not true anymore. They've managed to pervert copyright law from the constitutional purpose of "to promote progress" to one of absolute control of anything, including ideas, anyone makes.
Who is John Galt?
Microsoft just wants me to pay for it...
Apple? They want to sell things too, but they are also control freaks that would want to make sure you are using it the way they want you to.
I don't see how you come to that conclusion, at all.
Apple is the one that doesn't really take many countermeasures against jailbreaking. They've not made a fuss about AppleTV or iPhone jailbreaking.
Now here in this same story you find a dour letter from Microsoft about misusing the Kinect. And in Windows Phone 7, you have exactly the same degree of lockdown you do with the iPhone.
I could see an argument for saying both companies are just as locked down, but to say Microsoft is substantially better just ignores what they are doing, in any space they compete in.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I once had an interesting conversation with one of the executives of Lappset ("Lappset Group Oy is one of the leading manufacturers of playground equipment worldwide. Our products bring joy to millions of children and adults in more than 40 countries."). If you look at the list of countries that they operate in you'll find out it contains nearly all European countries, Australia, Israel and several countries in Asia... But not USA. He explained to me that this is because Lappset prefers the situation where their marketing and engineering departments are larger than their legal department. They (as a large, multinational playground equipment manufacturer) fear that if they would go for the north american markets, the amount of lawsuits would skyrocket and it just isn't worth it for them.
Another example is cosmetics. I recently happened to read some labels from my girlfriend's make up (I think they were eyeliners or such). The label had some general content and then something along the lines of "USA: Do not eat. If you consume this product, seek medical..." or something. Apparently the manufacturer felt that they had to warn against eating the cosmetics or they would be sued in USA but there wasn't risk of that in Europe... The warning was clearly labeled to be USA-specific.
It always amuses me that in theory the American ideology is "Personal freedom! Personal responsibility! No nanny states!" but in practice, people try to blame everything on other people (and actually succesfully win lawsuits in such cases). In the rest of the world we think "It is not nice if a child falls down from the swings or such... But that can always happen, whether the child was especially reckless or just had some bad luck..." but I don't think that the thought of suing the swing manufacturer, the land owner, the city, etc. would ever even occur to people (unless, of course, the equipment would really have been very badly flawed).
Now, obviously I realize that those stereotypes don't apply to all 3E8 americans. But they certainly seem to apply to quite a large portition of the people. I guess your system encourages to that: In most of the world, if you sue a large company, they are ordered to pay you a small compensation and a multimillion dollar fine to the government. In USA, they would be ordered to pay the multimillion dollar compensation to the person who sued them. Of course that encourages people to get greedy...
Its simple. This device costs a LOT less than a similar set of cameras+processing hardware from someone like PrimeSense (OEM for the kit in the Kinect). If you could use it for something other than playing games, there is suddenly a LOT less reason to buy the expensive kit.