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Hackers Try to Improve XBox


CaptainRAVE

Are you going to buy an X-Box??  

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  1. 1. Are you going to buy an X-Box??

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Although Microsoft's new XBox has already been touted as one of the most technologically advanced game consoles ever, hackers already were trying to improve it as soon as it hit the shelves.

 

"It's a very powerful piece of hardware--that's what motivates us," said a high-school boy, who runs a website devoting to hacking XBox. "It has the potential to do so much else. We can write lots of programs eventually to really exploit this thing."

 

XBox is, however, heavily protected, and so far achievements have been limited. The biggest advancement to date is replacing cables to make the connection between the hard drive and the CPU faster, but more is expected soon.

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There is also a hard drive cable swapping technique that's been used to access the hard drive on a PC. Since the hard drive is passworded, people will boot the Xbox, switch the IDE cables between the systems, and then boot the PC with the Xbox hard drive still powered. However, since the password is just a basic ATA-3 one that obviously has to be sent over the IDE cable during boot-up, simply using a logic analyzer on the cable could get the password, as I recall someone has already done.

 

However, there have been many more breakthroughs besides the common sense IDE cable trick. The BIOS, for instance, has already been copied, and the Xbox SDK has been leaked. File lists have been pulled from images of the hard drive, although I'm not yet aware of anyone having extracted any entire files. Some people are attempting to enable or create an RGB output so a VGA cable can be made. People have been speculating about and testing how different components inside interact, so work toward getting the thing completely figured out is progressing pretty nicely.

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CaptainRave-

I just wanted to thank you for your contributions to Yoda's Swamp; I look forward to see what is happening in the world (outside of what is reported on CNN) from you!

 

I find the whole xbox hacking thing hilarious; just more evidence that the damn thing is just a glorified PC...

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