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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.
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...
Depends how you do it. It's oddly ironic how now when it hurts MS they don't think reverse engineering is such a good idea. Especially since they made most of their money based upon IBM clones.
Additionally, I like how they're claiming that this has something to do with product tampering.
This would actually be excellent for robotics! Those specs are about on par with Point Grey's Bumblebee2 stereoscopic camera (the cheapest standalone stereoscopic camera for robotics), which retails at about $3,000! It would be great to be able to make cheap robots with that kind of stereoscopic imaging power.
Tamper-resistant? You mean, they're trying to stop me from using it the way I choose. Like how the screwdriver manufacturers add elements to the steel to make it so that I can't sharpen the end and make a pin-punch from it? Jeeesh!! What arrogance.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Once you sell one to me, it's my product, morons.
What the hell, are these X-ray machines or something with radioactive material in them that would sicken the user if he opened it up?!? I had better be sure thisn't some strange dream.
Whatever happened to people selling devices to other people, so they could use them as they see fit?
Not providing drivers fro other systems, fine, whatever you like, not your responsibility. Working with law enforcement to prevent 'product tampering?
Screw you MS, really.
Is it me or is 2000$ kinda cheap to hire someone with the expertise required to extract out kinect's source?
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.
Aye. A Kinect would be a great tool/controller for a computer.
Then again, maybe that's it - they don't want the computer to have one more way to compete with the 360.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
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.
Wrong.
Source: http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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
The BIOS wasn't, it was reverse engineered by clone makers.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Not true at all. Look at the hardware spesification sheets... An arm processor and 512 megs of ram? Thats more then just a webcam and a couple of mics. There is some serious potential for having a hardware device that does some onboard processing.
Winston, Inner Party members can turn it off - those propriety dictates that this be for no more than half-hour intervals.
Signed, O'Brien.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This kind of situation comes up all the time in the FOSS world.
Is there some sort of guide on how to structure a reverse-engineering project to ensure it's done properly?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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 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
They've got millions of hotmail users, a large ad network centered on Bing that also spans many high volume sites like Facebook, Wall Street Journal, etc.
Google search backs 65% of US search. (Microsoft is pushing 11%.)
Google controls 69%+ of the online advertising market.
Microsoft doesn't have a copy of all your Microsoft Office documents. Google has a copy of all your googledocs documents.
Google analytics infests more internet sites than i can count. Microsoft only gets analytics data for their own properties.
if you use their services, MS is still collecting your data.
Google gets *tons* of data on you even if you don't use there services thanks to adwords/advertising and google analytics.
Microsoft's "large ad network" is just a little slice of the advertising market.
Sure microsoft collects user data, but they aren't even in the same league.
Apple is the only company that has locked those down in the first place. Microsoft just added a walled garden app store; historically it was pretty wide open.
Yes and "historically" Apple has computers you can open and work on easier than PC's. Nothing really matters "historically", what matters is what they are doing NOW. And in that way Microsoft is just as closed as Apple.
And comparing the AppleTV to an Xbox is a superficial comparison.
It would have been had I compared an AppleTV to an XBox. Instead I was lumping it in with other IOS devices as things Apple doesn't really do much to stop jailbreaking on.
Apple also doesn't doesn't support blue ray(sic) because Steve wants to push his online distribution model.
Apple doesn't support blu-ray in part because of the licensing, although I'm sure the aspect of selling videos through other channels comes into play as well.
Similarly, they disallow flash on their devices without valid reason.
Well actually the reason is a dramatic drop in battery life. And Apple doesn't "disallow" Flash on anything except for iOS devices - they've just stopped including it by default in some computers. Which to bring the whole thing full circle, is exactly what Microsoft does with Flash...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley