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XBox (Games) Entertainment Games

Aussie Company Releases Xbox Mod-Chip Designs 214

Posted by timothy from the like-a-radar-detector-in-virginia dept.
An anonymous reader submits: "According to an article in the Australian Financial Review, An Australian computer chip designer will this weekend risk the wrath of Microsoft by making its sophisticated Xbox mod-chip designs freely available over the internet. This release is the second and most advanced design to date that has been released by this company, the earlier release of a much simpler design was covered by a previous article on slashdot. Go get'em while they're hot everyone. When you consider what has been happening to companies who irritate console makers, these files might not be around for long!" The AFR article requires subscription, but the AussieChip site has more information, including a link to the terms under which the designs may be downloaded -- looks like they're looking for some dedicated amateurs ;)
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Aussie Company Releases Xbox Mod-Chip Designs More

Aussie Company Releases Xbox Mod-Chip Designs

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  • Release the DMCA dogs, Smithers ...

  • "When I buy my xbox I should be able to do whatever I want with it, yada, yada, yada...."
    • why not? you paid the money for it. MS is just pissed because they're losing out on the money people are paying to mod it up... or are they?
      • If they have the right to fill whatever they sell with DRM and crap, then we have the right to mess about with whatever we buy.

  • go aussies (Score:4, Funny)

    by sixdotoh ( 584811 ) <sixdotoh AT hotmail DOT com> on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:19PM (#6264514) Homepage
    alright, finally the aussies are living up to their criminal heritage!!! (hey, i was born there at least . . .)

    seems the past few articles involving Australia on /. have been about them restricting rights.

    • Re:go aussies (Score:4, Funny)

      by MavEtJu ( 241979 ) <<gro.ujtevam> <ta> <todhsals>> on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:28PM (#6264550) Homepage
      When I teased my girl about it, she countered with "only the ones who were too stupid to be caught, the real ones are still over in England.".

      I am beaten, unable to use that argument again.
      • bash$ :(){ :|:&};:

        You're evil.

        • What's it do?
          • It's sad that I'm such a nerd I had no problem reading that.. It's a simplified forkbomb. in english: it runs itself, which runs iself, which runs itself... untily our machine cries out in agony and you reboot it. Unless of course your machine has proper restrictions on it (see: man ulimit; ulimit -a)
            • Seems that my linux box at home doesn't have proper restrictions on it, and now... for some odd reason is no longer acception SSH connections. OOPS. I just hope it doesn't make any noise while it melts until I get home to reboot the poor thing.

              This is limited to bash, correct? I use csh on HPUX at work and it doesn't fork, in fact, produces a syntax error.
              • As far as I know, That syntax is bash-specific. The concept of a forkbomb howver is a universal thing -- Just need to find the syntax in a langauge to fork another segmant of code, and have that segmant of code fork itself.

                As for not having the limitations, No worries. About the only places I've seen ever limit properly are payed shell providers, as it tends to be annoying on a home machine (things like gcc dont like it, and dont even think about running quake).

      • Re:go aussies (Score:3, Funny)

        by fermion ( 181285 )
        One the essays in Salmon of Doubt, by the late Douglas Adams, talks about a sign on a bridge which stated the punishment for defacing the bridge would be exile to Australia. He was surprised that the bridge was still in one piece.

        Adams then goes to ponder what one can say about a country where, at one time, one of the harshest punishment was exile to one the most beautiful places on Earth.

      • When I teased my girl about it, she countered with "only the ones who were too stupid to be caught, the real ones are still over in England.".

        So her point is that she wants to make it clear that she is decended from the ones who were both criminal and stupid enough to be caught?

    • Re:go aussies (Score:4, Interesting)

      by The Only Druid ( 587299 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:46PM (#6264630)
      Two points:

      Of the criminals who were sent to Australia, you should remember exactly two facts, at least:

      One, until the American revolution, those criminals were being sent to America as indentured servants; When the revolution occured, there was no means of removing those criminals from the overcrowded British system, meaning that instead they inhabited numerous overpacked ships for weeks and months off the shore of the UK.

      Two, of the criminals that were sent to Australia, something on the order of 70% (the numbers vary) were non-violent, and under the age of 20. The majority of these criminals were orphans who stole bread, prostitutes and the ilk. These weren't, without many exceptions, murders and real theives. Moreover, a significant portion of the colonists were Black Sheep of wealthy European families, sent to Australia with the combination of hopes that they might not embarass the family further, and that they might redeem themselves.

      Now, as to their rights...hey I love the country, and hope to move back there, but its a country that has a list of books/movies/games/music that the government deeps innappropriate, and can, if it wishes, refuse to permit their import. This occured recently, with GTA: Vice City, which forced Rockstar games to censor the game slightly for release there. Its a dangerous rule...of course the US (my current home) is getting precariously close.
      • Wow, orphans and prostitutes! What a great family tree! :-P
        • I guess I should add an extra detail: according to the University of Sydney's anthropology department, under 30% of the current Australian population has any significant ancestry amongst those original "criminal" colonists. The gross majority owe their ancestrry to the repeated waves of immigration by people from nearly every country in the world (although there is a surprisingly small population of non-whites, with the notable exception of the significantly large Chinese population).
      • The majority of these criminals were orphans who stole bread, prostitutes and the ilk

        I, for one, think that stealing prostitutes is a heinous crime... Not sure about stealing ilks though.

  • "Mod Chips" or "Linux-Enabling" chips? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:22PM (#6264525)
    Whoever controls the language of the debate controls the debate. (see "sharing" vs. "stealing")

    Can we start calling these "linux-enabling" chips or something equally positive, something that shows that they are NOT primarily designed to circumvent copyright?

  • Microsoft Won't Have To Do A Thing (Score:5, Funny)

    by aerojad ( 594561 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:24PM (#6264535) Homepage Journal
    Slashdot will surely keep this site down for a while to come!
  • An Australian computer chip designer will this weekend risk the wrath of Microsoft

    Naah, who would risk going after those Ford Falcon driving [geocities.com] weapon-carrying [geocities.com] reckless [geocities.com] Aussies, hey ?

  • Mirror Link (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:32PM (#6264570)
    Slashdot away: http://www.hysma.com/xbox/

  • Don't forget! (Score:5, Informative)

    by AndroidCat ( 229562 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:33PM (#6264576) Homepage
    There's a distributed project to crypto-crack the Xbox private key. This would allow runnning Linux or anything else on an unmodified Xbox (no mod chip), and would keep the warranty intact.

    Got some spare cycles and want to piss-off billg? Follow the link in my current sig. (The site is running outside DMCA-land, no worries.)

    • Re:Don't forget! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by alienw ( 585907 )
      Dude, just forget about it. Your project is useless. Cracking the key is computationally impossible unless you have a few billion years at your disposal.
      • It's not my project.
      • Heh, there's of course the infinitely slim chance that the 286 in the corner will stumble upon the key at 2 o'clock this sunday afternoon ;)

      • Re:Don't forget! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by JDWTopGuy ( 209256 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @09:23PM (#6264794) Homepage Journal
        Dude, it's a distributed computing project. Theoretically, with enough computers, it could be done in a few years.

        Well okay, it would have to be something like a couple of stadiums filled with dual processor 3Ghz systems running full-time, but hey, they just might get lucky. They don't have to search the entire keyspace in order to find the right key.
        • Actually, there's not much difference between having a single one or 10 million computers working on this. The numbers are still huge.

          For a 128-bit key:

          2^128 = 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 combinations
          (2^128) / 10,000,000 = approx. 34028236692093846346337460743176 combinations per node

          Not that much of a difference, is there?

          Also, may I inquire how you can find the key without searching the full keyspace? I don't think microsoft engineers are stupid enough to choose a vulnerable encryption a
          • may I inquire how you can find the key without searching the full keyspace?

            Confucious say: The place where you find something is the last place you look for it (unless you're stupid).

            In other words, once it gets found, you don't have to keep looking. Therefore, you most likely haven't searched the full keyspace by the time you find the correct key.

            From the forums on the Operation Project X site, by user "KONGEN":
            All that I have learned so far is (taken from verios threads):

            There are 2^2048 possible ke
            • It's a testiment to how closely Microsoft guards their security for the X-box that, even when you eliminate more than 90% of the available keyspace, you still have no hope of finding the correct key via brute force in one lifetime. 2048 bit encryption is rediculous. Banks use 1024, and that's overkill.

              Of course, if you look at it from microsoft's perspective, the xbox may be the equivilant of a bank. In a year or two, it might start making money.

              ~Wx

    • Re:Don't forget! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:46PM (#6264626)
      There's a distributed project to crypto-crack the Xbox private key. This would allow runnning Linux or anything else on an unmodified Xbox (no mod chip), and would keep the warranty intact.

      Methinks voiding the warranty will not be a problem by the time the project finishes.

      Remember Distributed.net? Aka, the guys who took years(and years...) to prove how easily they could crack RC5 given all that distributedcomputing power? :-)

      • I haven't looked at exactly how they're trying to solve it, but it seems to me that it should be possible to take a few short cuts.
        • "A few short cuts" might reduce the time from trillions of years down to hundreds of billions. Still, it's a waste of CPU.
        • What would be really deliciously ironic would be a big stack of X-boxes running the cracking app.

          Hehe.
      • Aka, the guys who took years(and years...) to prove how easily they could crack RC5 given all that distributedcomputing power? :-)

        Not to be too offtopic, I think the point was more to prove how rediculously flimsy DES was in protecting information compared to RC5. That is what the company behind RC5 wanted to prove, not necessarily d.net's objective.

        You do have a point though. I don't know the details of the encryption scheme for XBox, so I don't know how quickly a solution is likely to be found.
    • This would allow runnning Linux or anything else on an unmodified Xbox

      And how is that better than spending the same ~$200 for a normal PC that absoultely SMOKES the XBox?
    • A. You can already run Linux on an unmodified Xbox.

      B. Distributed took 250 days to find a 56 bit key. A 64 bit key took 1757 days to find. Now you want to find a key that is 2048 bits long?

      Am I missing something? All this just to sign code so it runs with MS crypto? Let Microsoft keep their key.

  • But Sony lost a case in Australia where they were seeking to make mod-chipping illegal. I would guess it's probably perfectly legal to sell them here.
  • So if the reason behind making these consoles not work between different countries is to increase sales, has it been successful?

    Have people bought more than one X-Box or PS2 because they weren't able to play their favorite game on the unmodded box?
    • The reason for regional restrictions is to allow the companies to impose price discrimination. The idea is that you want to charge any one person as much as they are absolutely willing to pay before going someone else. Normally, you have to set a single price -- if you charged the wealthy citizens of the US more for Super Mario Brothers 5, someone would just import Indian copies sold cheaply. However, if you can break up the world into incompatible regions, you can charge a much closer value to what peop

  • flood the site (Score:4, Funny)

    by jesler ( 683123 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:39PM (#6264595)
    If Microsoft doesn't want anyone to see these designs, they need only bring the site to its knees with a flood of traffic, generated by a well-placed article on highly-viewed website.

    oh... wait...
    • Can we apply this to other things? Wouldnt it be great if instead of wasting time trying to tell people that guns are bad, we just told everyone that they should buy guns?! Gun stores would soon run out of firearms, AND THEN IT WOULD BE JUST LIKE NOBODY HAVING GUNS AT ALL!!! YOU ARE A FUCKING GENIUS, MAN!!!


  • What a way to piss in Bill G's morning coffee.

    Great timing too. I just got my copy of "Hacking the XBox" from "Bunny" Huang in the mail.

    Now...where'd that bottle of Ferric Chloride go?

  • Dear Microsoft Inc. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SuperDuG ( 134989 ) <be&eclec,tk> on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:41PM (#6264607) Homepage Journal
    I am writing you on behlaf of the X-Box Purchasing community. I would like to thank you for your wonderful product that you are selling at a loss, and tell you that we are all very happy to watch your stock index fall.

    Anyways, I am writing you today to inform you that your wonderful copyright protection and region protection schemes have been broken. I request that you save the entire community some time next model and just forget the entire copyright idea all together. We want to play with our X-Box's the same as we want to play with our toasters, but you don't see GE breathing down our necks when we do it.

    Sort of a word to the wise if we buy it, and we're bored, we're going to screw around with it. Anyways I hope you have a wonderful day monopolizing the Operating System industry and ignoring the supreme court.

    Lots of love,

    Everyone.

    • Re:Dear Microsoft Inc. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Microsoft stock is up was up yesterday. Actually it is up 3 points since June 6. Your plan to bankrupt Microsoft seems to be failing. I would also point out that NOT buying the Xbox wouuld be an even greater loss to Microsoft.

      What's even funnier is that their latest game - Brute Force - is doing very well. Since games are where they make their profit I would say that you and your "X-Box purchasing community" are pretty damn stupid.
    • Simple answer why GE doesn't mind you messing with the toaster. They don't sell bread.

      And I think that if you somehow found a way to copy bread that you would be far to busy accepting nobel prices to be worried about silly little laws like the dmca.

  • Not true (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fobbman ( 131816 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:47PM (#6264633) Homepage
    "When you consider what has been happening to companies who irritate console makers, these files might not be around for long!"

    Not true. Thanks to one of the benefits of the Internet, now that this information has been released and has been covered by the major geek media, there will be enough people who will download it so that the information will live on for a long, long time.

  • Ban Computers (Score:5, Funny)

    by t_allardyce ( 48447 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:58PM (#6264684) Journal
    I think its obvious what course of action needs to be taken: Ban computers. Computers are responsible for almost 100% of DMCA violations: These tools of outlaws come in several categories:

    -Personal computers:
    these remain the no.1 tools of criminal "hackers" allowing them to propogate virii and pirate material and to violate the DMCA

    -General purpose processors and microcontrollers:
    these are used as mod chips, clearly tools that are used to violate the DMCA

    -The internet (another by-product of computers):
    is responsible for allowing numerous DMCA and copy right violations including the spreading of mod-chip plans, pirate material, and George W. Bush jokes.

    Im serious, i can guarentee that once personal computers are banned there will be atleast an 80% drop in the number of DMCA violations! If you dont think banning personal computers is a law that can be enforced then think again: There exist large databases of computer owners sourced from retail shops, online stores, credit card transactions, software licenses and ISP's. Personal computers also emit an EMF at the frequency of their internal clock, these can be detected and categorised - higher frequencies usually denote more powerful and therefore more illigal computers. Its true that there are legitimate uses for computers, but in this case they should be restricted to government use only.

    Let me leave you with a thought: Terrorists also use computers!!!!!!
    • "Personal computers also emit an EMF at the frequency of their internal clock, these can be detected and categorised - higher frequencies usually denote more powerful and therefore more illigal computers."

      Not if your shit is Tempest grade....

    • It is not computers that break the DMCA, it is people that break the DMCA !!!

      So kill people !!!
      • No no no! lets not get stupid here, kiling people to solve the DMCA problem would be stupid, and illigal - people are protected by some very old laws. I would suggest however that peoples brains be altered to prevent them breaking the DMCA and if this technology does not exist, then the brains should be removed. Its the only way to have computers without DMCA violations, the only way i tell you!!
  • As long as someone posts a bittorrent link after (preferably before) their site is /.'ed, I'll be happy.
  • Look at all them mice and keyboards!

    You'd think if he could afford that many monitors that he could afford to buy a data switch.

  • The thing about information... (Score:4, Funny)

    by heli0 ( 659560 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @09:32PM (#6264829)
    "these files might not be around for long"

    you can't unring a bell.
    • you can't unring a bell.

      Yeah, but in 5 minutes, who CARES if you rang it? Seriously, how many copies of the DVD decoder thingy are still floating around? Compare with 1 year ago?

      How many tweaks do you find for the once insanely popular Atari 2600?

  • Uncensorable mirrors... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Myself ( 57572 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @09:39PM (#6264855) Journal
    If anyone actually gets ahold of this, despite the inevitable heavy slashdotting it will receive, please mirror it on Freenet [freenetproject.org]! It's very hard to censor a network with no servers, no administrators, and no controlling entity. ;) If the Powers That Be don't want you corrupting your mind with impure knowledge, then such material belongs on Freenet!

    If you're not familiar with the Freenet project, take look: Users donate bandwidth and space by running a "node", and the network's content exists in the collective datastore shared by thousands of nodes.

    Data is duplicated as it's retrieved, so popular content gets more redundantly distributed. Node-to-node communications are encrypted, and so is the content in each datastore. You don't know and can't control what's on your own node.

    The usual interface to Freenet is a web browser, since web pages and images can be easily inserted into the network. Other types of data (music, movies, programs) are common, and front-end programs exist to facilitate large uploads and downloads.

    Check out Freenet, run a stable node, and play with it! The more you use it, the faster it gets. Bandwidth is more important than space; if you can host a node on something faster than a dialup it would be nice.

    Oh, and here's the cool thing about Freenet that makes it perfect for things like modchip designs: Once inserted, content cannot be forcibly removed. Even the creators of the network can't delete something from it. The only way content falls out of freenet is if everyone ignores it.
    • It's very hard to censor a network with no servers, no administrators, and no controlling entity.



      No servers? Then how does it serve content?

      • The nodes could be called servers, or clients, or routers, or storage, depending on how you view them. The distinguishing characteristic of Freenet is that the people running nodes don't know what's in them.

        Freenet's a nice place to publish blogs, since there's no advertising and no hosting cost. You're asked to run a node if you're able, to help the network in general, but you're under no obligation to do so.
    • Also check out Konspire2B [sourceforge.net], a blog-like freenet for recent information, as opposed to archived content like freenet
    • We recommend a processor equivalent to at least a 400MHz Pentium 2/3, with at least 192MB of RAM.

      Shesh...what a pig of an application!

  • This is NOTHING new, only a rip-off something else (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:43PM (#6265109)
    Check out this
    http://warmcat.com/milksop

    Thats the REAL creator of the CheapMod, Andy Green.

    This news is NOTHING new as cheapmod information has been around for more than a 8 months.

    If your going to post an article of this maginituted, do some research first.
  • I'm not a gamer, but I just don't see the point of modifying an Xbox. I know Fry's isn't everywhere, but there's one near where I live that's selling a Linux box (sans monitor) for $229 right now. That's in the ballpark of an Xbox, and I know which one I'd rather have. Since a cheap PC is about the same price, why not just buy a cheapie and run Linux (or whatever you want) on that instead? But like I said, I'm not a gamer, so maybe I'm missing something.
    • 1. The Xbox is a cheepo PC with an excelent output to TV display. I'm not up to date on current video cards but when looked at TV output before, they were all shite. I had to invest in a mpeg decoder card to get decent output. I'll have to check out my new vid card when i'm not so lazy.

      2. The Xbox is a tiny PC, making it perfect to put on your entertainment stack. Nice for AV, possible additional application of car mount system (not sure about car mount xbox to be honest, it would be something worth
    • I modded my XBox so I could access files on the hard drive, and replace the included drive with a bigger one. I am also interested in copying games (which I own) to the drive to hack them and extract the audiovisual files for viewing/listening on my PC.

      I don't pirate games, but I also don't like manufacturers telling me what I can't do with a console I own. I bought a chipped PS2 for the same reasons, and I've done similar extraction work with tools like Dreamrip on the Dreamcast.

      A lot of the time, I just

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