to be able to PROVE that any similarity to bash arose in a "cleanroom reverse engineering environment."
First, MS wouldn't have to prove this. The burden would lie on GNU to demonstrate illegal copying of code. They might be able to subpoena pieces of Windows code to do line-by-line comparisons, but don't count on it.
Second, there are lots of people out there who have programmed in Perl, Python, and bash without ever bothering to look at the source code behind them. Including me. I could go take this job (Yay, India!) without any risk of tainting MS code with Perl, Python, or bash sources.
Imagine Stahlman winning a copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and Windows getting "infected" by the GPL
Imagine spelling "Stallman" properly.:P
Imagine a standalone command-line interpreter getting "infected" and the remainder of Windows remaining "clean." MS grudgingly ships code to, gasp, the equivalent of xterm+bash, and no one cares.
Imagine a judge realizing that stopping shipments of Windows is an extreme measure and finding some lesser solution. Companies (Stacker and Sun, to name two) have won lawsuits against Microsoft before, but not to the point that they've blocked sales of DOS or Windows.
Microsoft already ships Unix code (Interix), old Mosaic code (IE), and Perl. Shipping something with syntax slightly similar to bash is unlikely to be a problem.
But Security Office wants us to believe that they hax0red some random MS Server and just happened to find a detailed analysis on Unix vs Windows?
Security Office has a bunch of other documents that they swiped from MS. They are totally genuine. (They appear to have been pulled from the account of an MSR intern from the summer of 2000.) They could have made up a Unix vs Windows whitepaper. But several other documents on the site are full of internal URLs, internal email addresses, and information that no outsider would guess. Do you really think they'd just guess details like "The systems and networking (SN) group normally eats lunch together between 11:30 and noon" and "The SN group has a two informal reading group meetings on Tuesdays in 112/2005?" (Both true.)
I do not know how Security Office got these documents. I do not know if all of their documents are genuine. But some of them quite clearly are.
"we should eat our own dog food"? Not one analysis I have ever read had such a ridiculous analogy in it.
That's a pretty common analogy. Netscape uses it, too, even when talking to the public. It just means that developers are asked to use the product they're developing, as a sort of pre-alpha testing.
The one most disappointing thing about this leak is that everything they got is two years out of date. If they broke into someone's account, couldn't they at least poke around the network, look at the goodies on http://linux, steal roadmaps for Blackcomb and Yukon, etc?
How is it Nintendo et. al. can program an incredibly skilled Tetris AI, but scientists at MIT cannot?
1) The Nintendo AI doesn't have to be optimal. It just has to be better than a human.
2) Being better than a human at Tetris is less about placement than it is about agility. You may be better at figuring out where pieces should go, but the Nintendo will always be better at actually getting them into place.
3) The problem Nintendo solved is much more tractible because it only deals with two pieces at once. The problem MIT posed deals with the entire sequence, potentially hundreds of pieces. The problem is (probably) exponential, so each additional piece that must be considered makes the problem about 20x harder.
The Triangle is in North Carolina, consisting of Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill. The Univerisities: Duke, NC State, and UNC-CH. Otherwise known as the Research Park, such companies as RedHat are based here, IBM, Cisco, Nortel and others haev large offices here as well.
The Triangle != Research Triangle Park (RTP). RTP is a few square miles devoted to industry, mostly located in southern Durham County. The Triangle is the entire region and its 1.2 million inhabitants.
RedHat is no longer in RTP. They moved 15 miles East to Raleigh.
the presence of people dressed up in ridiculous suits, jugglers, and a square-shouldered man in drag does not make an event a 'circus'
It just made the show corny. Everyone who went had to listen to a "ringmaster" speech about how great the circus was. Ick.
At many stages it's unclear whether the robots are remote or ai-controlled.
IIRC, every robot shown in the video was remote-controlled. The climber, the ping-pong ball grabbers, the volley ball grabbers, and the battlebot were definitely all controlled. The Triangle Ameteur Robotics club had some (presumably) autonomous robots, but they weren't showing them doing anything.
One thing that was very cool was a robot climbing up a wall and what looked like looking for holes to put something into.
Mindstorms, built by one of the guys presenting it. (And trying very hard to sell $200 Mindstorms kits to anyone who showed any interest.) My impression was that it was tuned for pretty specific hole locations. I don't think it was "looking" for holes.
I must say, I am a bit surprised to see this on Slashdot.
The Tech Circus was run by Bob Young, Mr. Red Hat. So I'm not surprised it got coverage at Slashdot.
One last lame bit that wasn't shown in the videos: the computer cluster on the show floor, which was offline for most of the time I was there, was running Windows. I know Mr. Young is divesting himself from Red Hat as fast as he can, but you'd think there'd be at least some loyalty to Linux at his show. Nah.
Overall: unpolished, unremarkable, and underattended.
Politech reposted it days ago, perhaps making them Marxists, vandals, and thieves. No need for you to repost it here, too, and help confirm that Slashdot is full of Marxists, vandals, and thieves, too. The Ayn Rand Institute was reserving rights to the piece in hopes of publishing it as an op-ed. They'd be right in criticizing you for reposting it.
In case it wasn't clear, the link I posted wasn't my own. It was the Politech link that Mr. Lessig mentioned. No need to add yet more copyright infringement to support the Ayn Rand Institute's criticisms of copyright critics.
You want to make a profit selling someone elses work, and use that profit to fight to destroy legislation protecting copyrighted work, so you can continue destroying individual rights.
Walt Disney, creator of those early Mickey Mouse works, has no individual rights left. He's dead. You're promoting the "rights" of a huge corporation to use government power to grant themselves a continued monopoly on the use of 75-year-old cartoons. Some "rights."
Authors have no inherent "individual right" to the use of their ideas. Copyright is not a right like the right to free speech and physical property. Copyright is a bargain: to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, government grants short, limited monopolies for the commercial uses of certain types of art. To claim that perpetual, posthumous control over your ideas is a natural right is absurd.
For those wondering about lessig's mention of the Ayn Rand thing: [snip]
Unless you were trying to validate the Ayn Rand Institute's libelous assertion that proponents of the public domain are just thieves and vandals, perhaps you could've settled for a link.
the anti-EULA section of the bill explicitly excludes computer software:
Rep Lofgren hails from the San Jose district in California. Her constituents (the influential ones, anyway) are in the technology industry. They want the right to Rip, Mix, and Burn, but they also want continued protections over uses of their software.
Ms. Lofgren is representing her constituency. That's her job. So be it.
If you don't like EULAs, fight the UCITA, and don't buy software with EULAs.
Rep Lofgren's bill probably isn't even intended to pass. It's intended to get a voice out there to debate Sen Hollings. It defines a spectrum. It tells the rest of Congress that Sen Hollings is a raving, preserve-the-Mouse-at-all-costs lunatic. Rep Lofgren is giving consumer rights groups, the consumer electronics industry, Apple, and civil liberties groups a bill to support.
What gets passed, if anything, will be somewhere in between Lofgren's bill and Hollings's bill.
doesn't this law say the exact opposite of quite a few laws either previously passed or currently being debated?
Most of the provisions in Rep. Lofgren's bill that conflict with existing laws are edits or clarifications -- they replace or qualify previous statements, but they don't contradict them outright. For example, it would still be illegal to distribute circumvention devices, unless they're required (no other easy way to get fair use exists) and marketed as fair-use devices. That is, cable descramblers sold as "ADV: GET FREE CABLE!!" are still illegal. Signal descramblers sold as "Tivo digital adapter" would now be OK.
Conflicts with proposed legislation are quite common. What gets passed, if anything, will be a compromise between the Lofgren bill and Sen Holling's "government-mandated DRM in all electronics" bill.
Freenet's search has, through multiple independent simulation-based studies (cited in the link I give above), been demonstrated to have logarithmic scalability, not the linear scalability you claim.
The very paper you links to shows that median request path length is N^0.28. Logarithmic, that's not.
Freenet has probabilistic, polynomial-time lookup and unbounded routing table size. Chord-like DHTs have deterministic, logarithmic-time lookup and logarithmic routing table size. Anonymity is nice, but it's costly.
Freenet's worst-case performance -- i.e., when its routing table state is cold -- is O(N). Just like Gnutella. Chord's worst-case performance is still logarithmic.
Dunn, giddy over the success of the exercise, responded: ''This is the future of flight.''
That's unlikely. Batteries weigh far too much for the amount of energy they can store. Jet fuel is hard to beat from an energy density standpoint. Weight matters a lot on an airplane.
A practical electric car would be much more useful. Cars spend more time idling, have less efficient engines, and do all their polluting in a relatively small space. Airplanes, in contrast, fly efficiently, generate thrust efficiently, and spread out their pollution better. There's a lot less need for electric planes, even if the weight and refueling problems could be solved.
At least he didn't suggest hybrid planes that employ regenerative, um... braking.
One last question: why did the electric motor cost $20,000?
I think most folks would agree that an image of a thing is not the thing. Of course, there's the whole "simulated child pornography" thing which goes the other way,
On April 16, 2002, the Supreme Court (of the US) overturned the "simulated child pornography" ban. So even that is once again legal. Not only that, but that case should serve as a tidy precedent to protect fake murder images and fake speedometer images.
However, the passport thing is different. He went beyond simulating a crime to trying to convince someone the image was a real passport. That's fraud. He might have a defense if the judge who tries his (hypothetical) case is a Trekkie.:)
Um, put a polarizing filter on the monitor, add a simple 90 degress polarized light source to the front of the monitor (translucent sheet) put on your polarized glasses and you are set.
Simpler than that. Normal LCD monitors use liquid crystals between two polarizing filters. So this nifty new secure monitor is just a normal LCD monitor without the front polarizing filter. It's less monitor, for five times the cost.
hallways full of tons and tons of monster corpses to mark the trail of where you've been
Play Halo. Dozens of enemies at once, many of them clever, all of them messy and bloody when they die. They leave not just corpses, but blood stains, too. Yum.
I hope they give thought to not pushing the models so much that they have to magically sweep away the dead bodies...
There's an easy way to do beautiful, complex monster models and still have the corpses: use fewer polygons in the corpse models. They already use fewer polys in models viewed from a distance (levels of detail, or LOD), so why not scale back corpse complexity, too?
I think it's time to buy a Microsoft X-Box::ducks::
You say it in jest, but the suggestion is actually apt for the thread at hand. The X-box plays CDs and even allows me to rip them to the internal hard drive and use them as background music while I play games. And Microsoft can't put spyware on it if it's not even plugged into the network.
Dot files. Loads of them. Four from RealPlayer, six from Gnome, five from Pine, three from Sawfish, and three NFS lock files, among a total of 140 entries.
Good thing Linux doesn't have a registry. It might get cluttered.
if someone manages to build Xbox binaries with other tools (gcc) and without the libraries and headers that come with Microsofts SDKs, I don't think Microsoft will be able to do anything about that.
Sing it with me! "It's fun to sue with the D-M-C-A!"
Really. A mod chip is a device specifically intended to circumvent access to the XBox. If Microsoft can argue that the XBox qualifies in some way as a copyrighted work, they can protect it (and sue U.S. mod chip sellers) under the DMCA. If the mod chip lets you play copied discs, boom, it's a circumvention device.
They could probably actually win that one in court. But even if not, a cease and desist letter will usually suffice.
Ahhh...this is a very incriminating Word document....this digital photo of the screen needs to go to the press!
That problem is easy to take care of once Microsoft gets NT Embedded running in every digital camera, checking for watermarked emails that you shouldn't be allowed to photograph. I suppose they'll have to ban film cameras, or find a way to check for watermarks there, too.
They can have my Pentax K-1000 when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.:)
A 1GHz Duron can do real-time DivX decoding for barely 1/3 the price, without chewing up a PCI slot. Why should I buy an add-in card? Lest you say, as the Tom's review does, that it breathes new life into old PCs, a 1 GHz Duron kit costs just a little bit more than this $99 add-in board, and is a hell of a lot more useful.
Not trolling. Just pointing out that not all that glitters is worth $99.
This, right here, is all the evidence you need that the system is flawed: "For instance, Palladium might allow you to send out e-mail so that no one (or only certain people) can copy it or forward it to others. Or you could create Word documents that could be read only in the next week." If I can read it, I can copy it. If I can read it today, I can read it tomorrow. The only way to even begin to enforce that absurd policy is to trust every application with access to your encryption keys or decrypted text not to permit copying.
There are two ways to do that: by banning any software not directly trusted by Microsoft, or by passing the data around encrypted until it reaches the screen (and, of course, trusting that the screen's private key will never be discovered). I'm not sure which is scarier, but I honestly don't think even Microsoft has the power to accomplish either.
And they claim this: "Eventually, commercial pitches... can be stopped before they hit your inbox--while unsolicited mail that you might want to see can arrive if it has credentials that meet your standards." There is no way to allow email from strangers without also allowing commercial email from strangers. It's possible to reject all unsigned email (and thus, at least, know who is sending you spam). All hail the death of anonymity.
And last, it pains me to see that "security" has stopped meaning "protecting your computer and data from attackers" and now instead means "protecting your computer and data from you." A computer that enforces DRM isn't more secure. More authoritarian, more expensive, and more likely to let me watch DVDs, but not by any means more secure.
This is probably how the Xbox prevents third-party operating systems from running,
Nope. The Xbox's mechanism is mostly software. The CPU is a plain-vanilla Celeron. It reads a trusted, private chunk of memory (512 bytes, includes an RC4 key and RC4 decryption routine) out of the memory bus, then uses that to decrypt firmware from flash ROM. The firmware uses public-key encryption to verify the software in the DVD drive.
The way around this is to grab the symmetric key (done!) and write new flash that's encrypted with it but doesn't bother checking the validity of the DVD. That's probably not how the mod chips work, but it's a viable approach.
Expect Microsoft to fix this problem, however. They won't modify the CPU itself, but they could check a hash of the flash ROM before executing it.
The primary purpose of encryption is to take insecure channels and turn them into secure channels. If the military has spare insecure satellite channels (or is using insecure civilian channels), why not layer an encrypted tunnel?
Slashdot Mirror
First, MS wouldn't have to prove this. The burden would lie on GNU to demonstrate illegal copying of code. They might be able to subpoena pieces of Windows code to do line-by-line comparisons, but don't count on it.
Second, there are lots of people out there who have programmed in Perl, Python, and bash without ever bothering to look at the source code behind them. Including me. I could go take this job (Yay, India!) without any risk of tainting MS code with Perl, Python, or bash sources.
Imagine Stahlman winning a copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and Windows getting "infected" by the GPL
Imagine spelling "Stallman" properly. :P
Imagine a standalone command-line interpreter getting "infected" and the remainder of Windows remaining "clean." MS grudgingly ships code to, gasp, the equivalent of xterm+bash, and no one cares.
Imagine a judge realizing that stopping shipments of Windows is an extreme measure and finding some lesser solution. Companies (Stacker and Sun, to name two) have won lawsuits against Microsoft before, but not to the point that they've blocked sales of DOS or Windows.
Microsoft already ships Unix code (Interix), old Mosaic code (IE), and Perl. Shipping something with syntax slightly similar to bash is unlikely to be a problem.
Security Office has a bunch of other documents that they swiped from MS. They are totally genuine. (They appear to have been pulled from the account of an MSR intern from the summer of 2000.) They could have made up a Unix vs Windows whitepaper. But several other documents on the site are full of internal URLs, internal email addresses, and information that no outsider would guess. Do you really think they'd just guess details like "The systems and networking (SN) group normally eats lunch together between 11:30 and noon" and "The SN group has a two informal reading group meetings on Tuesdays in 112/2005?" (Both true.)
I do not know how Security Office got these documents. I do not know if all of their documents are genuine. But some of them quite clearly are.
"we should eat our own dog food"? Not one analysis I have ever read had such a ridiculous analogy in it.
That's a pretty common analogy. Netscape uses it, too, even when talking to the public. It just means that developers are asked to use the product they're developing, as a sort of pre-alpha testing.
The one most disappointing thing about this leak is that everything they got is two years out of date. If they broke into someone's account, couldn't they at least poke around the network, look at the goodies on http://linux, steal roadmaps for Blackcomb and Yukon, etc?
--Patrick
1) The Nintendo AI doesn't have to be optimal. It just has to be better than a human.
2) Being better than a human at Tetris is less about placement than it is about agility. You may be better at figuring out where pieces should go, but the Nintendo will always be better at actually getting them into place.
3) The problem Nintendo solved is much more tractible because it only deals with two pieces at once. The problem MIT posed deals with the entire sequence, potentially hundreds of pieces. The problem is (probably) exponential, so each additional piece that must be considered makes the problem about 20x harder.
The Triangle != Research Triangle Park (RTP). RTP is a few square miles devoted to industry, mostly located in southern Durham County. The Triangle is the entire region and its 1.2 million inhabitants.
RedHat is no longer in RTP. They moved 15 miles East to Raleigh.
It just made the show corny. Everyone who went had to listen to a "ringmaster" speech about how great the circus was. Ick.
At many stages it's unclear whether the robots are remote or ai-controlled.
IIRC, every robot shown in the video was remote-controlled. The climber, the ping-pong ball grabbers, the volley ball grabbers, and the battlebot were definitely all controlled. The Triangle Ameteur Robotics club had some (presumably) autonomous robots, but they weren't showing them doing anything.
One thing that was very cool was a robot climbing up a wall and what looked like looking for holes to put something into.
Mindstorms, built by one of the guys presenting it. (And trying very hard to sell $200 Mindstorms kits to anyone who showed any interest.) My impression was that it was tuned for pretty specific hole locations. I don't think it was "looking" for holes.
I must say, I am a bit surprised to see this on Slashdot.
The Tech Circus was run by Bob Young, Mr. Red Hat. So I'm not surprised it got coverage at Slashdot.
One last lame bit that wasn't shown in the videos: the computer cluster on the show floor, which was offline for most of the time I was there, was running Windows. I know Mr. Young is divesting himself from Red Hat as fast as he can, but you'd think there'd be at least some loyalty to Linux at his show. Nah.
Overall: unpolished, unremarkable, and underattended.
Politech reposted it days ago, perhaps making them Marxists, vandals, and thieves. No need for you to repost it here, too, and help confirm that Slashdot is full of Marxists, vandals, and thieves, too. The Ayn Rand Institute was reserving rights to the piece in hopes of publishing it as an op-ed. They'd be right in criticizing you for reposting it.
In case it wasn't clear, the link I posted wasn't my own. It was the Politech link that Mr. Lessig mentioned. No need to add yet more copyright infringement to support the Ayn Rand Institute's criticisms of copyright critics.
Walt Disney, creator of those early Mickey Mouse works, has no individual rights left. He's dead. You're promoting the "rights" of a huge corporation to use government power to grant themselves a continued monopoly on the use of 75-year-old cartoons. Some "rights."
Authors have no inherent "individual right" to the use of their ideas. Copyright is not a right like the right to free speech and physical property. Copyright is a bargain: to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, government grants short, limited monopolies for the commercial uses of certain types of art. To claim that perpetual, posthumous control over your ideas is a natural right is absurd.
Unless you were trying to validate the Ayn Rand Institute's libelous assertion that proponents of the public domain are just thieves and vandals, perhaps you could've settled for a link.
Rep Lofgren hails from the San Jose district in California. Her constituents (the influential ones, anyway) are in the technology industry. They want the right to Rip, Mix, and Burn, but they also want continued protections over uses of their software.
Ms. Lofgren is representing her constituency. That's her job. So be it. If you don't like EULAs, fight the UCITA, and don't buy software with EULAs.
What gets passed, if anything, will be somewhere in between Lofgren's bill and Hollings's bill.
Most of the provisions in Rep. Lofgren's bill that conflict with existing laws are edits or clarifications -- they replace or qualify previous statements, but they don't contradict them outright. For example, it would still be illegal to distribute circumvention devices, unless they're required (no other easy way to get fair use exists) and marketed as fair-use devices. That is, cable descramblers sold as "ADV: GET FREE CABLE!!" are still illegal. Signal descramblers sold as "Tivo digital adapter" would now be OK.
Conflicts with proposed legislation are quite common. What gets passed, if anything, will be a compromise between the Lofgren bill and Sen Holling's "government-mandated DRM in all electronics" bill.
The very paper you links to shows that median request path length is N^0.28. Logarithmic, that's not.
Freenet has probabilistic, polynomial-time lookup and unbounded routing table size. Chord-like DHTs have deterministic, logarithmic-time lookup and logarithmic routing table size. Anonymity is nice, but it's costly.
Freenet's worst-case performance -- i.e., when its routing table state is cold -- is O(N). Just like Gnutella. Chord's worst-case performance is still logarithmic.
--Patrick
That's unlikely. Batteries weigh far too much for the amount of energy they can store. Jet fuel is hard to beat from an energy density standpoint. Weight matters a lot on an airplane.
A practical electric car would be much more useful. Cars spend more time idling, have less efficient engines, and do all their polluting in a relatively small space. Airplanes, in contrast, fly efficiently, generate thrust efficiently, and spread out their pollution better. There's a lot less need for electric planes, even if the weight and refueling problems could be solved.
At least he didn't suggest hybrid planes that employ regenerative, um... braking.
One last question: why did the electric motor cost $20,000?
On April 16, 2002, the Supreme Court (of the US) overturned the "simulated child pornography" ban. So even that is once again legal. Not only that, but that case should serve as a tidy precedent to protect fake murder images and fake speedometer images.
However, the passport thing is different. He went beyond simulating a crime to trying to convince someone the image was a real passport. That's fraud. He might have a defense if the judge who tries his (hypothetical) case is a Trekkie. :)
IANAL, in the US or in Nigeria.
Um, put a polarizing filter on the monitor, add a simple 90 degress polarized light source to the front of the monitor (translucent sheet) put on your polarized glasses and you are set.
Simpler than that. Normal LCD monitors use liquid crystals between two polarizing filters. So this nifty new secure monitor is just a normal LCD monitor without the front polarizing filter. It's less monitor, for five times the cost.
Play Halo. Dozens of enemies at once, many of them clever, all of them messy and bloody when they die. They leave not just corpses, but blood stains, too. Yum.
I hope they give thought to not pushing the models so much that they have to magically sweep away the dead bodies...
There's an easy way to do beautiful, complex monster models and still have the corpses: use fewer polygons in the corpse models. They already use fewer polys in models viewed from a distance (levels of detail, or LOD), so why not scale back corpse complexity, too?
You say it in jest, but the suggestion is actually apt for the thread at hand. The X-box plays CDs and even allows me to rip them to the internal hard drive and use them as background music while I play games. And Microsoft can't put spyware on it if it's not even plugged into the network.
--Patrick
ls -ld ~/.* | wc -l
Dot files. Loads of them. Four from RealPlayer, six from Gnome, five from Pine, three from Sawfish, and three NFS lock files, among a total of 140 entries.
Good thing Linux doesn't have a registry. It might get cluttered.
--Patrick
Sing it with me! "It's fun to sue with the D-M-C-A!"
Really. A mod chip is a device specifically intended to circumvent access to the XBox. If Microsoft can argue that the XBox qualifies in some way as a copyrighted work, they can protect it (and sue U.S. mod chip sellers) under the DMCA. If the mod chip lets you play copied discs, boom, it's a circumvention device.
They could probably actually win that one in court. But even if not, a cease and desist letter will usually suffice.
--Patrick
That problem is easy to take care of once Microsoft gets NT Embedded running in every digital camera, checking for watermarked emails that you shouldn't be allowed to photograph. I suppose they'll have to ban film cameras, or find a way to check for watermarks there, too.
They can have my Pentax K-1000 when they pry it from my cold, dead hands. :)
Not trolling. Just pointing out that not all that glitters is worth $99.
There are two ways to do that: by banning any software not directly trusted by Microsoft, or by passing the data around encrypted until it reaches the screen (and, of course, trusting that the screen's private key will never be discovered). I'm not sure which is scarier, but I honestly don't think even Microsoft has the power to accomplish either.
And they claim this: "Eventually, commercial pitches ... can be stopped before they hit your inbox--while unsolicited mail that you might want to see can arrive if it has credentials that meet your standards." There is no way to allow email from strangers without also allowing commercial email from strangers. It's possible to reject all unsigned email (and thus, at least, know who is sending you spam). All hail the death of anonymity.
And last, it pains me to see that "security" has stopped meaning "protecting your computer and data from attackers" and now instead means "protecting your computer and data from you." A computer that enforces DRM isn't more secure. More authoritarian, more expensive, and more likely to let me watch DVDs, but not by any means more secure.
Nope. The Xbox's mechanism is mostly software. The CPU is a plain-vanilla Celeron. It reads a trusted, private chunk of memory (512 bytes, includes an RC4 key and RC4 decryption routine) out of the memory bus, then uses that to decrypt firmware from flash ROM. The firmware uses public-key encryption to verify the software in the DVD drive.
The way around this is to grab the symmetric key (done!) and write new flash that's encrypted with it but doesn't bother checking the validity of the DVD. That's probably not how the mod chips work, but it's a viable approach.
Expect Microsoft to fix this problem, however. They won't modify the CPU itself, but they could check a hash of the flash ROM before executing it.
My point was not to take credit for thinking of encryption. My point was to wonder why the military isn't using it.
Was my message too subtle? I'll try to use smaller words next time.
Encryption is a munition, remember?
--Patrick