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Microsoft Says Kinect Left Open By Design
kai_hiwatari writes "Around two week ago when Adafruit announced a bounty for developing an open-source driver for the Kinect, Microsoft made it clear that they didn't condone it. Now Microsoft seems to have realized the potential of their device and has made a U-turn. Alex Kipman, Xbox Director of Incubation, now says that they left the Kinect open by design. Kipman said, 'What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect, by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor.'"
Just guess which will be my next console
Corporate may have wanted it closed but the engineers left it open. I'm guessing some of the engineers hoped folks would do fun stuff with it. But to say MS wanted it open is crap since reps said a few times now the opposite in quite an aggressive tone. Note that I take issue with the article title, not what Alex Kipman said.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
If Microsoft's knee-jerk reaction is the wrong one, well, that's to be expected. They're assholes by nature. But, if after sleeping on it (and consulting with their lawyers and engineers and finding out there's nothing they can do that won't eat up every cent of profit they might have made on the thing) they come up with the right decision, I'm willing to forget their previous stance. Keep it up long enough, and they might even earn some goodwill.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Fixed that for you!
Get other people to invent and develop, then they can patent and troll!
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Woooooosh.
It wasn't a flip flop, it was one random persons comment within MS earlier on that everyone has assumed is gospel on MS's stance. If MS had: Given a press release, stance commented on by someone among the top (like the director of the gaming division), or made an official statement this would in fact be a flip-flop. Instead this was the intention that one random uninformed person didn't know about in the first place.
Now it would probably also be different if people wanted to do something besides using the kinect...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I haven't seen any Kinect APIs or support in Visual Studio. I do see some very early libraries by some 3rd parties.
For Steve "Developers^3" Balmer to not have the resources in place is pretty ludicrous and tantamount to negligence. They obviously have all the pieces, I just don't see them in play. If they were smart, they would start rolling this out the SDK and OS integration before Christmas. Unfortunately, I have about as much faith in MS handling this right as I do the Dallas Cowboys making the Super Bowl this year.
I am much more excited by gesture and voice controls then touch interfaces. I have a cold this week and just trying to keep my monitor clean without touching it is a challenge.
I read this statement as: "we are NOT going to sue or try sue unauthorized Kinect developers. we are not going to upload new firmware to close the barn door every time it connects to the Internet. We are not going to try to figure out who is doing this and ban them from XBox Live."
All this is great news.
I read this statement as: "we are NOT going to sue or try sue unauthorized Kinect developers.
And I read it as "we are NOT going to sue unauthorized Kinect developers unless they come up with some really revolutionary, astounding and above all - money making - idea."
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
How can they think anyone would believe this?
It is ridiculous not to, it would be easy for them to encrypt the code, they haven't even tried. That is not an oversight, that is by design.
Interesting how it's now great news for a company to not be a fucking asshole and prevent owners of the devices from doing whatever they want with them. Used to, this was just considered what any normal company would allow.
Can you spell DMCA?
People far too often ascribe personal characteristics to a corporation to the extent of viewing them as having one mind, one vision, one goal. That's not the case of course. They are made up of many people, who have different objectives. This is particularly true in the case of the massive conglomerate types like MS that doesn't have a controlling leader.
So what very well could have happened is that the development/project team on Kinect said "Let's leave this sucker open. We aren't going to spend any funds developing alternate uses, but let's not spend any time putting shit to prevent it either. Let people do whatever the hell they want with it." So Kinect gets developed with that in mind. However when it is launched and people look at it Assistant PR Flunky Third Class Number B was asked about hacking it, probably with the journalist using the term "hacking" and then fired back with Standard Lawyer BS Statement Regarding Hacking Form 5114CXX1 Subtype J which said "Graaaah! Hacking bad MS smash!" After a bit this makes the rounds, while Kinect is hacked, and internally the questions is asked as to the real intent. The director of the project says "It was supposed to be open!" and after clearing that with legal and corporate for release, they do so.
Notice the original statement was "a company spokesperson." In other words some low level guy who gets the calls when a news publication wants to know something, someone with no real knowledge or authority. This new statement is from Alex Kipman, a director at Microsoft who is directly involved with this, someone who knows what the hell is going on.
So that's probably what happened. Not changing their minds, just normal corporate confusion. The statement Cnet got was just a generic response from PR, that probably hadn't been well considered or prepared, just pulled from the "We defend our IP," bin. The second statement is their real position, from the project director.
No, it "isn't some random project by 4 college dropouts." Based on what I see from the outside about the way MS works it's more likely to be:
13 MBAs from prominent schools who specialize at yelling at their subordinates
1 guy from the former Soviet Union with a Master's degree in EE
1 guy with a Master's degree in Java UML frameworks from each country that has a population over 1B
18 part-time contractors and outsourcers
Only one of these is likely to know what the word "hackable" means and he's smart enough to know when to keep his mouth shut.
Of course, they didn't bother to implement the encryption features of the ActiveSync protocol developed by this company called Microsoft, for this server product called "Exchange" so companies that require remote device encryption can't use these brand new phones. In fact, Android doesn't support it yet either. (but hey, its not a google protocol or server, so i cut them slack). In fact, the only mainstream device that does support it is the iPhone.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
False. The Kinect has hardware (ASIC's, IIRC) to do stereo vision, as well as an infrared textured light projector. This hardware does textured-light stereo, which is very computationally intensive task. You're getting RGB+D images for the computational price of reading from a webcam, instead the cost setting up a textured light projecter, reading two webcams and running stereo software. You also get a stable, well calibrated system, instead of what you'd get with building your own. It also costs $150 instead of $200, BTW.
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Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
While it may be true in this instance that they intended to leave that interface open, assuming that being a successful company implies that all their actions are deliberate is taking it too far. To paraphrase ...somebody- never ascribe to competence what can be adequately explained by indifference.
True. it is pretty darn obvious that when MS first heard about "hacking" the Kinnect they were worried about actually having another device that could pretend to be a valid Kinnect. This has not been done. In fact, what was done is not really hacking - more just determining what the USB signals are. Nothing was broken, no security was compromised, etc. MS now realizes that it wasn't what they thought it was and are certainly not upset that you can use a Kinnect on other platforms. They just don't want to have other devices that can authenticate as a Kinnect to an XBox 360 so that cheating isn't enabled. Very straightforward.
Windows Phone 7 encryption is all about DRM and so there's little in the Kinect to protect. Plus, they need every bit of processing they can get on the Xbox so encrypting the sensor stream would have required CPU power to decrypt and again, what's there to protect? My guess is that it was just easier to just the data as it was delivered and to even try to do as much as possible on the Kinect before shipping data over the USB bus.
Microsoft probably realized that if they try to block this it will make them look more like idiots instead of business people looking to make money of anything they can. If they locked it down it would cost them CPU cycles on the console, they'd sell fewer Kinects. and they'd look like the protectionists they really are.
They did the right thing by leaving it alone and continuing to sell it as a separate device. I am surprised they are not requiring it be sold with a bundled game at a higher price though.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Since you are suggesting that everything they leave open is deliberate, I should say it's high time to start suing their balls off for all the security holes, viruses and botnets they've enabled.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
More importantly, adding encryption and decryption adds latency. This is something that you want to avoid in any input device, but especially in one that is used for games.
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Hacking means taking a (usually integrated circuit or code based) product that was designed for, built for, tested for, and meant for use A, and modifying it or its inputs or its outputs for use B. Cracking is bypassing a security system, by means of hacking, for the purpose of hacking or some other purpose.
By these definitions, the Kinect was hacked. If the internal Xbox algorithms had been found and used or if someone had augmented the Kinect to cheat in a game, then that would probably be bypassing security systems (I don't know the specific internals of the Xbox) and that would be cracking.
The Kinect wasn't hacked, either. What it does is create a RGB+D image, along with providing a 4-microphone array and a few other ancillary functions. This has not been changed, it's inputs (The images/sounds it captures) and it's outputs (Video, Depth Map, Audio, Accelerometer data) have not changed either. All that has happened is that someone has written a driver for the device by observing the data. If they had opened the unit and read and decompiled the firmware off the ASIC, or decompiled a firmware update, then sure, that's hacking. Observing the (unencrypted) data flow? Not hacking. Replaying the data back to the device? Not hacking.
Is it "Hacking" a printer to write a driver for it, without touching or modifying the printer itself in any way? How about a serial modem? How about any other device out there?
If they had, for example, opened up the device and used a JTAG header to get the data from it, or installed different firmware on it's ASIC to export the data in a different format, then I would be all for your definition of "Hacking". As it is, they've written a driver for an "Unknown device". The proof of this is that you can go and buy a Kinect raw from the store, plug it in fresh out of the box with no modifications whatsoever, and it works perfectly. And that a Kinect thus used can be transferred back to an XBox 360, where it will continue to work as if nothing has changed.
The tl;dr version: Circuit bending a Speak'n'spell? Hacking. Jailbreaking a phone? Hacking. Installing Linux on a consumer router? Hacking. Writing a device driver? Not hacking.
The Xbox 360 encrypts the contents of RAM and hides the overhead behind the memory access latencies. I really doubt encrypting the Kinect data stream would have added much overhead. It might have added cost though, and why bother? As pointed out, there isn't a whole lot you can do except "build cool stuff" with this data. Given the completely crazy security system the core Xbox has, they clearly are telling the truth.
Exactly.
The quote from the MS exec was taken from this week's Talk of the Nation Science Friday show on NPR (as pointed out in the article) which I think is available as a podcast. It was an interesting segment because despite the obvious product evangelizing that was going on, they really do seem enthused about how a device like this will be a game changer in the way we interact with technology.
In the first part of the quote, not included in the fine summary, he takes pains to point out the Kinect hadn't been "hacked". He gives two meanings of hacked, the second one being that nobody has been able to modify the signal coming from the Kinect sensors before it gets to the Xbox...which would allow cheating.
I no longer consider Windows PCs open systems. Windows NT 6.x builds DRM deep into the system. Certain hardware such as video cards are required to implement undocumented features for Windows certification. This is done to facilitate the "protected path" for Blu-ray playback.
The Windows 7 EULA prohibits you from installing software that would add functionality to the system.
The reason "Linux gaming is still a sad affair, even with Wine" is because the hardware is undocumented. Without documented hardware, it is nearly impossible to write good drivers for that hardware. Wine sucks for games (aside form hardware issues) because of DRM. Currently, the Wine developers have a policy of not "patching out" the DRM on malware-infested games.
Digital Restrictions Management is a problem for Windows too. You can not install AAA titles on a computer you use for business because you can not install games under a separate limited user account. The DRM requires Administrative access: one of the reasons UAC was introduced. Why Microsoft didn't copy Apple in their MacOS9->X transition, I don't know. I suspect it is because they are hoping to make their money on DRM systems in the future.
He's probably right. You should see what they did with Windows Phone 7; the protocol they speak over USB is encrypted, even though the protocol is known, and the data being transferred is usually also known. It has deep security.
Now, maybe they didn't leave it open specifically because they wanted people to write an open source driver, but if they had been serious about keeping it closed, they would have almost certainly given it a better attempt.
Windows 7 will be sending personal info between it and the computer, so it should be encrypted.
the Kinetic is a device for a video game console, encrypting it would be really stupid, imo.
Your comparing apple and oranges.
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