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Kinect Hacked, Adafruit Bounty Won
scharkalvin writes "Adafruit has announced a winner to their bounty for an open source driver for the MS Kinect. From the article: 'We have verified that it works and have a screenshot from another member in the hacking community (thanks qdot!) who was also able to use the code. Congrats to Hector! He's running all this on a Linux laptop (his code works with OpenGL) and doesn't even have an Xbox!'" We talked about Adafruit's bounty yesterday.
What the Kinect does have is anti-cloning. The Kinect cryptographically authenticates itself to the 360 (but not the other way around, as far as I can tell). In other words, it should be very hard to clone, but this doesn't affect efforts to use it outside of the original Xbox platform.
It seems to me like the people in charge of those Microsoft PR statements don't really know what they're talking about. Sure, there's some "security" around the Kinect (in the general sense of anti-cloning and associated Xbox updates), but as far as I can tell, no effort has been made to prevent DIY use like this. Getting it to work was comparable to getting any other proprietary USB device to work: an exercise in reverse engineering and traffic replaying, but there were no deliberate obstacles along the way.
Kinect is net positive and not sold at a loss.
http://www.lazygamer.net/microsoft-will-make-a-profit-on-every-kinect-sold/
See that depth image on the left in the vid? That's worth it's weight in unobtainium oxide to roboticists.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
What they said was "Suck my chair bitch, who run Ballmer town?"
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
No. With the GPL, you don't have to agree to it unless you distribute the GPL'd software. If you don't distribute the GPL'd software to anyone (or code that includes GPL'd code), you don't have to agree to the GPL. Otherwise, you would violate copyright law. Accepting the GPL grants you exceptions from copyright law so you can redistribute the software, but you don't violate copyright law in your own fair use.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
According to the world bank, Belgium is ranked 10th for their GDP per capita. This is higher than Germany, France, the UK and Italy.
It seems to me that Belgium is punching above its weight.