Microsoft Says Kinect Left Open By Design

Posted by timothy on Saturday November 20, 2010 @07:34AM from the always-at-war-with-eurasia dept.

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.'"

1 of 215 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Oh yeah by phantomfive · 2010-11-20 07:55 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

--
Qxe4