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How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

eaton-works.com

221–230 of 266 posts

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#221
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xbone is not hacked because nobody care about essentially a boring pc without any memorable games. It will remain in history as another Microsoft marketing disaster. One day it will eventually and silently destroyed to be emulated like all ancient arcades and microcomputer games protections. Every protection can and will be broken. Regarding unsuccessful money grab, Idea that Microsoft minds forsaw that people will w…

> Xbone is not hacked because nobody care about essentially a boring pc without any memorable games. No, it's because MS gave them the keys right out of the gate with Dev Mode.

The keys couldn't unlock the GPU door though (I mean, dev mode apps couldn't use the graphics api). And iirc ram was limited. To me that allows for some incentive to root/jailbreak the device.

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#222
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>their actions show a great deal of respect towards the ingenuity of console hackers, because if they didn't, they would've never bothered to do such an effort thwarting them. dude. The irony. They bricked our machines and joked about it. They had a fellowship with the FBI. They (MS and EA) threw OP, the author of this fkn submission, in jail. Their own Terms of Service and Policy Enforcement page still brags about "…

You have any more info on who this person is and what they were convicted of?

Probably the OP post is written by Eaton Zveare.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/07/09/could-you-end-up-in...

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#223
post #68
post #56

Microsoft really seemed to be ahead of the curve with console security. They really thought this through back in 2005 or so, to the point where clearly, they knew people would hack the drives to rewrite the serial number. It's probably for the best that they never actually did anything about the knowledge that gave them, but they clearly stayed a step ahead of the game. As much as I hate it, their actions show a grea…

>their actions show a great deal of respect towards the ingenuity of console hackers, because if they didn't, they would've never bothered to do such an effort thwarting them. dude. The irony. They bricked our machines and joked about it. They had a fellowship with the FBI. They (MS and EA) threw OP, the author of this fkn submission, in jail. Their own Terms of Service and Policy Enforcement page still brags about "…

>They (MS and EA) threw OP, the author of this fkn submission, in jail.

It's not like they got jailed because of MS's sheer spite to hackers - no, they made good money hacking MS consoles. Essentially, it's one capitalist against the other, and they had to be aware of the rules of the game.

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#224
post #56

Microsoft really seemed to be ahead of the curve with console security. They really thought this through back in 2005 or so, to the point where clearly, they knew people would hack the drives to rewrite the serial number. It's probably for the best that they never actually did anything about the knowledge that gave them, but they clearly stayed a step ahead of the game. As much as I hate it, their actions show a grea…

Probably helps they are a big OS company but I think they went all out on security because of how severe softmodding scene was on the original Xbox. IIRC there wasn't useful softmods for GameCube or PS2 during the lifetime of the system whereas I knew several people with modded Xboxes with larger drives that they'd rip rentals onto.

Xbox 360 also had XNA, I think you needed a paid membership to actually boot a game on it though. And on the last few Nintendo consoles they've had BASIC programs available letting you write your own software. Obviously there's some limitations there but people have done some neat stuff and it's even possible to do 3D. The original Famicom also had BASIC available.

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#225
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I agree. > Make no mistake, MS and Xbox still hate us. I should point out that I was not suggesting there was a good relationship between console hackers and Microsoft. Quote from me again: > respect towards the ingenuity of console hackers I did not say they had respect for the people , or that what they were doing was good, or anything like that. I'm claiming that from a security standpoint, they took the thre…

Some Xbox hackers were arrested but it's fair. Some people stole hardware. This is interesting read. https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/45/

An hour later, wow. That podcast is mesmerising. That’s absolutely incredible what they were up to. Thanks for the share, on to part two now.

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t produce good quality rips like this, if that was the best solution the DRM people would have won.

You can produce pixel perfect rips. But since the resulting video file is so large you will "need" to compress it, and then you get compression on compression artefacts.

Yes, indeed. Pixel perfect rips of already compressed streams, immensely blowing up the size and requiring another round of lossy compression to actually be useful.

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#227
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? I don't even think there Are official Steam Deck sales numbers. The best I can find was that they shipped over 1 million last October, not sold. But that was actually not long after they BEGAN shipping units. Not only that, but we're comparing it to the Switch, which is one of THE best selling game consoles ever . However, in its first year, IIRC, it actually "only" sold around 10 million units. That suggests th…

For what it's worth, I've never owned a console of any kind in my life, but I would really like to own a Steam Deck. Though I could buy the Steam Deck now, I am eagerly waiting for Steam Deck 2 just to see if there are lessons-learned-improvements from the first iteration.

> Though I could buy the Steam Deck now, I am eagerly waiting for Steam Deck 2 just to see if there are lessons-learned-improvements from the first iteration.

Just wait for the Steam Deck 3, where they'll solve all the problems that don't even exist yet on the Steam Deck 2. Or better yet, might just wait for the Steam Deck 5 just to make sure they've finally ironed out all the kinks.

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think Xbox Dev Mode is really worth a damn. You can sideload apps but it’s not a vector for piracy or running Windows or Linux. PS3 Linux was about as useless as PS2 Linux, because the PS3 had only 256MB of RAM. I put Ubuntu Server on one and used it as a Squid proxy server to route P2P traffic through to the university’s college of computing since P2P was blocked in the dorms. For some stupid reason I totall…

>I don’t think Xbox Dev Mode is really worth a damn. You can sideload apps but it’s not a vector for piracy That's the point

The person I’m replying to make it sound like Xbox Dev Mode came about because Microsoft was tired of trying to keep hackers out, but the reality is Microsoft has kept hackers out. You can’t jailbreak an Xbox One.

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#229

I don't get the value from preventing a customer from modding the device. Presumably, the customer gets more value out of the modded device, which means more sales to the device vendor. The IBM PC was a runaway success because it was user moddable. IBM failed to recognize this with their follow-on PS/2, which was locked down. It flopped. DEC's Rainbow PC flopped because they tied it to proprietary floppy disks. Chrys…

> I don't get the value from preventing a customer from modding the device.

For many, having locked down consoles is a feature not a bug. It massively reduces the odds of coming across people running cheats in online gaming. It still happens, sure. But in the end it is far less common when cheating requires buying hardware modifications from potentially shady marketplaces, soldering things on to the board, potentially breaking your hardware, and potentially blacklisting your hardware on official matchmaking systems.

You're never going to get to zero cheaters, but if you make it more difficult to cheat and make it easier to blacklist expensive hardware it'll massively reduce the odds of your player base encountering cheater in an average match. Encountering less cheaters increases player satisfaction and keeps players playing your games.

I didn't buy a game console for it to be a general purpose computer to do whatever I want, I bought a game console because I want to play games. If I want a general purpose computer to hack around with I'll go buy a Pi or an ESP32 or some other SBC instead of a Switch or an Xbox or Playstation.

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple (and to a lesser extent Android) have already gone this route, and Windows 11 originally wanted to push _hard_ on enforcing the presence of more platform security. DRM schemes already perform remote attestation before you can stream 4K Netflix. Linux and Open Source may be one of the last remaining barriers to this becoming widespread. It's one of the main reasons I whole-heartedly support Valve and their Steam…

> DRM schemes already perform remote attestation before you can stream 4K Netflix. On Intel clients, this is done via the Management Engine, bypassing both the CPU and operating system, as the ME can control display output.

doubt it, should be on OS level, gpu control for all possible vendors and output formats is impossible without gpu driver support.
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