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[faster90]

It's good that he didn't release the firmware or else it would've affected the chip makers. It would also have a greater impact with noobs that doesn't know how to flash a firmware and mess-up their drive. Lastly, this could well affect Live in many ways. MS would go after the homebrew scenes aggressively.

[mrjkwik]

whether the patched firmware gets released doesnt matter to me at all.  i dont have that drive, arent going to purchase another drive just to run on live either.  and i have live and hardly use it.  i'm too picky about the games i play.

do i care about piracy?  no.  why, because of the proven reason that has been published by more than one researcher (search digg for specifics).  many people who pirate games, wouldnt buy the games even if they couldnt get them game by other means.  so the game makers dont lose much.  but yes, the lose some.

in otherwords by nature people are greedy.  if they can get it for free, they will.  if they cant, they wont.

how can you really blame the guy?  sure, a lot of people have released different things for modded boxes, and to a certain extent, ms themselves have turned a blind eye.  look at how sony has responded to chips and compare what ms has done about it.  and my opinion is that the reason ms has never gone hardcore after chip makers and all is because xbox live is their golden child.  their main innovation for consoles.  and the easier dollar to make.  afterall, modders for the most part, dont effect live since we cant access it.  take however many subscribers they have, multiply that by 5 dollars (the average of a monthly subscription, and a yearly subscription/per month), then multiply that by 12, and thats what they are making per year from live (for lazy people, thats 90 million a year based off of January 05 subscription numbers).

dont mess with bills easy money.  

thats why even if he/they run the same hack on the 360, will it get released?  if his reasons are genuine for not releasing it for xbox, seems as though they would pertain to 360.

best to still hope for a chip that runs homebrew/unsigned code, and blocks live.

only way "most" will be happy.

[RedivideR]

QUOTE(sephiro499 @ Feb 1 2006, 01:43 AM)

While it is a technical feat what the Specialist has done why make such a big deal about it if you aren't going to release it into the wild?

Because it IS a big deal that the concept works! Only thing left is to wait for someone to use the info available to reproduce this kind of hack for the 360 and release it anonymously.

[ZPaul2Fresh8]

Kind of a waste if you ask me...

Should've kept it to himself since he will not release it.  

But good job non the less    keep up the good work, now focus on the 360 for free  

[ZPaul2Fresh8]

QUOTE(quenlin @ Jan 31 2006, 08:04 PM)

1 - Perhaps everyone here cursing him out, calling him names, or calling him a liar is forgetting that this guy owes none of you a goddamn thing. If he was on the fence before about the morality of releasing the hack, then maybe after reading this shit his mind will be made up. I would rather keep something like this to myself than send it out so a bunch of whining, sniveling crybabies who write like they have a 5th grade education could use it.

2 - Even though he mostly discusses the legal implications of releasing it, i get the impression that he's much more worried about the moral side of things. With this thing out there Live cheating WILL become rampant, and MS, who has been rather passive in going after modders up until now, will start going after everyone full force. Legal manuevering by gigantic corporations against the little guy can be like a tidal wave. And I think that's what he's worried about. He doesn't want ordinary people being hit with huge lawsuits on his conscience.

3 - You can talk about the homebrew scene, linux, region free dvd, and fair use all you want, but the FACT of the matter is that the VAST majority of people that have a modded x-box want to be able to play games they don't own. PERIOD. I don't need to conduct a survey to know that the percentage of people who modded their x-box but have NEVER played a backup they don't own is virtually microscopic. The 'fair use' excuses and other justifications are tiresome.

Woohoo, pat that guy on the back! People want the damn firmware patch, there's no denying that. But I think the patch is useless. It will only allow people to cheat on XBL. If you want to run backups, softmodding is SO MUCH EASIER. You don't even have to crack the case.

Hence, a waste of time EXCEPT if you look at it as a learning experience. But again, I'm not dissing the Specialist, he seems like a cool cat.

[TSOPrano]

QUOTE(krawhitham @ Jan 31 2006, 05:57 PM)

if it will be so easy to detect why have we not seen xbox utilites that read and flash DVD firmwares?

Like I said above, fire up ConfigMagic. It reads the EEPROM and maybe it gets info from the DVD firmware filtered through it but it does know what drive/model etc you are using.

[failurbydesign]

Its like blue balls....in a way........

[tronxoe]

I just wonder:
Why didn't anybody think about this hack before?

1. At the early stage of xbox hacking, There was already 1 or 2 tutorials about replacing an Xbox DVDROM with a PC DVDROM. This means kernel doesn't check if the DVDRom firmware is legit!
2. And long ago, we had found a media flag in xbe telling which media is a game/application allowed to be run on.

This hack is probably simple by changing the answer
whenever the kernel asks the DVDROM:
"What type of media is inside you rightnow?".
And DVDROM always answers "It's a retail DVD" (even if it's a DVD-R inside).


Congrat TheSpecialist!

[TSOPrano]

QUOTE(krawhitham @ Jan 31 2006, 05:57 PM)

if it will be so easy to detect why have we not seen xbox utilites that read and flash DVD firmwares?

Like I said above, fire up ConfigMagic. It reads the EEPROM and maybe it gets info from the DVD firmware filtered through it but it does know what drive/model etc you are using.

[UrbanRiot]

QUOTE(tronxoe @ Feb 1 2006, 02:32 AM)

I just wonder:
Why didn't anybody think about this hack before?

A few reasons:

1) There's less people doing the down and dirty reverse engineering hacking than you might realize.

2) Someone may have, but they kept their mouth shut realizing they either don't want the scene attention, or any type of legal wrangling.

3) Once chipping, tsop flashing and softmodding became the norm it wasn't really necessary to poke into ATAPI communications.

[cONEction]

QUOTE(tronxoe @ Feb 1 2006, 02:32 AM)

I just wonder:
Why didn't anybody think about this hack before?

1. At the early stage of xbox hacking, There was already 1 or 2 tutorials about replacing an Xbox DVDROM with a PC DVDROM. This means kernel doesn't check if the DVDRom firmware is legit!
2. And long ago, we had found a media flag in xbe telling which media is a game/application allowed to be run on.

This hack is probably simple by changing the answer
whenever the kernel asks the DVDROM:
"What type of media is inside you rightnow?".
And DVDROM always answers "It's a retail DVD" (even if it's a DVD-R inside).

I ask myself the same thing, the concept is easy and I think hacking the dvd firmware was much easier than hacking the XBOX itself, I dont say I could have done it.
I knew this was possible because I have followed the Game cube scene for a while and we got the XenoGC chip lately, which is nothing more than a DVD hack just like this one, so I knew this was also possible with the XBOX drive,

Anyways thumps up for thespecialist, he did a great job, I think he has a life and is worried about the concequences, since I can understand that he is not just a student hacking stuff, but has great background knowledge about firmwares in general, so he might lose his job and more if he is from the Netherlands, since they are pretty hard lately on hardware modders.

I do hope that he continue his work on XBOX360, and sell his work to Teamxecuter, gets rich (what smart ppl deserve) and enjoys life

[iLLNESS]

the whole arguement is, why is this guy bothering to say he did it, if he has absolutely no intention of releasing it

just a waste of bw, waste of news, and a waste of your breath.

really i could care less if it makes it otu. if it does great for the scene. if it doesnt, perhaps you shoulda kept your mouth quiet about it all. just gonna be alot of pissed off sceners now

[bourke]

QUOTE(iLLNESS @ Feb 1 2006, 02:55 AM)

the whole arguement is, why is this guy bothering to say he did it, if he has absolutely no intention of releasing it

just a waste of bw, waste of news, and a waste of your breath.

really i could care less if it makes it otu. if it does great for the scene. if it doesnt, perhaps you shoulda kept your mouth quiet about it all. just gonna be alot of pissed off sceners now

If you actually used your eyes and brain before your fingers/mouth you would see that he actually posted information on pretty much exactly how he did it.

So any mug with an computer engineering degree is perfectly capable of replicating!


I'll give it 4 months now until the Xeno360 chip arrives and I install it :-)


Cheers,
Bourkie

[ndsbass]

QUOTE(iLLNESS @ Jan 31 2006, 07:55 PM)

the whole arguement is, why is this guy bothering to say he did it, if he has absolutely no intention of releasing it

just a waste of bw, waste of news, and a waste of your breath.

really i could care less if it makes it otu. if it does great for the scene. if it doesnt, perhaps you shoulda kept your mouth quiet about it all. just gonna be alot of pissed off sceners now

exactly

all though its a cool idea he seems to brag a little too much, especially if hes gonna keep it for himself. i dont think it should be widespread either, or at least until this is implemented in the 360 so at least the modding community has a headstart on ms and a possible live update to block modified firmware.

i congratulate the specialist on his work, however his whole news item seems to be "o look how good i am, i feel like bunnie, etc.".

[mij1525]

Agreed.  I don't think he did it.  But if he did, and he's not going to tell how, then shut up about it.  I could do without bragging taking up my bandwidth.