How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

More awareness needs to be made of how this will have a devestating impact on end-user freedom. They're attacking the PC, one of the last holdouts of general-purpose computing freedom. Remote attestation will make it so you "can" technically run your own hardware and software (and that's what the FUD-spreaders will always say), but you'll be denied access to lots of, increasingly online, services.

Edit: nice, downvotes. Hello corpo-authoritarians, we know what's up :-)

> 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 threat very seriously.

Microsoft legally bullying people is bad, but it's nothing new from Microsoft. Hell, it's nothing new from the console industry either. I actually was not aware of Microsoft putting anyone in jail over the Xbox homebrew/modding scene, but it does not surprise me. I remember what happened with Sony and Geohotz.

Still, from a sterile, technical point of view, I do think that in 2005 they were way, way ahead of keeping their console "secure" according to their threat model. I am never going to be particularly fond of a threat model where the adversary is the customer, but that's not really the point.

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.

I think you will agree that security in computing is not just "prevent people from getting hacked" or some static goal like that, but rather security is the management of "threats" under a given "threat model".

DRM, for example, is DEFINITELY a form of security software. DRM is an attempt to uphold policies around the access and/or copying of digital data such that access, distribution, etc. is controlled by said policy. Like any security software, it is meaningless if it's trivial to bypass, so it employs techniques to prevent users from modifying it, inspecting it, and otherwise bypassing its security measures.

Similarly, technology that is meant to only allow licensed hardware is largely the same idea. Like SEGA's Trade Mark Security System, although instead of cryptographic signatures, they instead hinged on the threat of a lawsuit. This is still a form of security system, just with a very different model of the threat.

What I am not saying is that these security measures are any good for the consumer. Obviously, these measures are very largely anti-consumer. Arguably there are some potential consumer benefits in limited cases (the most honest answer is probably anti-cheat, because most online games are frustratingly unplayable without some strong approach to dissuade cheating) but that is still not really my point. How is this security? It's simple. It's security against the threat of the end user. It upholds policies that the device vendor would like to impose on the consumer.

A lock is still a security device even if you abuse it to lock somebody in a room against their will.

No, it's because MS gave them the keys right out of the gate with Dev Mode.

Security is about reducing the frequency of events, and the impact of those events- Not making things philosophically impossible.

TBH the Xbox 360 console was like a refresh of XBMC. One of the greatest things about the 360 out of the box was it played popular video codecs directly from USB storage - unmodded!

Unheard of at the time.

I had an early model PSX console in high school and bought the plug and play mod chip online in 2000 or so. Rented a lot of games and bought a lot of verbatim blue bottoms

Later a USB plus 1 wire mod chip for the PS2 that let me play backups and homebrew

I think the trouble is that people kept finding ways back from arbitrary code execution in a limited environment to running pirated games and cheating in online games, and Sony continually failed to actually manage that.

XBox vs PS2: XBox was faster, but PS2 launched earlier, was cheaper, and had more games, so won the generation.

XBox 360 vs PS3: Sony reacts to Microsoft by making the PS3 more powerful than the 360 and more expensive. Microsoft reacts by getting more games and really doubling down on Halo (the biggest draw to XBox back then). XBox wins the generation.

Note: this is from memory, didn't check sources!

It was! I was a pre-teen then but I remember modded controllers and getting into modded lobbies. The only modding I did was USB modding my avatar and gamerscore, only to login a month or so later to the prompt that my account was banned forever.

I think “optimize the UX a bit” is what they did, and it falls very woefully short of what they need. Especially when it arguably has a far bigger and better library of titles.

I hope Valve doesn’t throw in the towel after the first round. The Steam Deck idea can be a killer one. It just needs a lot more UX polish and marketing.

That's the point

Rephrasing:

> You can sideload apps so it's not a vector for piracy

Most of the piracy scene depends on hackers figuring out how to break security so that they can run [SWEET DEMOS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8JaG6hQVbA) and homebrew apps on it. By saying "yeah mate here, toggle some settings, pay $90, and we'll even help you break the seal" it completely eliminates the drive that most experienced attackers have to actually attack it.

From what I understand there's an informal bounty among the Xbox and Hyper-V teams that increases on a regular basis for unsigned executables on the Xbox One platform.

Until 2021, the official maximum power for USB-C PD was 100W (5A at 20V), and your notebook is older than that. Dell has a non-standard extension for higher power, which uses a higher current (above 6A) and the same voltage (20V); the newer standard instead keeps the same maximum current (5A) and allows for higher voltages. It makes sense that third-party devices implement neither Dell's non-standard extension nor the newer standard (which your laptop could not use anyway), and so are limited to 100W, or 60W if you're not using a 5A cable.

Good. It was a terrible machine anyway, overheating problems, noise problems, shoddy keyboard/power button construction. Avoid Dell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

So you could legally make unlicensed copies of Super Mario Bros but they couldn't be called Super Mario Bros. This is why a lot of old bootleg games change the titlescreen to say, say, "7 GRAND DAD[0]" instead of "Super Mario Bros". This behavior actually seems to persist to the present day despite these copyright loopholes having long since been fixed.

Of course there were companies that got around the logo check with custom hardware[1]. And Nintendo themselves got lazy and didn't check the whole logo on the Color. So it's possible to change the boot logo on basically every Game Boy.

The court case you're thinking of has to do with SEGA's Trademark Security System (TMSS) for the Genesis. Sega v. Accolade to be specific. The broad strokes are similar, though - small bits of copying to sell an original unlicensed work are acceptable because console hardware is not copyrightable just because you worked on it real hard.

[0] Fleenstones? Aaaaugh...

[1] The Game Boy BIOS has a TOCTOU bug. AFAIK this is also how Argonaut Software managed to get an in with Nintendo to publish X in Japan.

https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/trademark-patent-cop...

Oh well, too bad. Maybe one day ;)

That’s pretty toxic

    Drives MS was selling had _plenty_ of margin. Which is why MS went that way

There are a lot of extra costs for MS though. Maintaining a separate SKU. Retail packaging. Cost of unsold units. Negotiating a supply of HDDs from e.g. WD which had to keep a production line or whatever open for that model when they otherwise might have phased it out sooner. The plastic enclosures. Etc.

Some of the price/GB differential may well have been gouging but some of it was also certainly overheads such as those I mentioned. There was zero possibility MS's retail Xbox360 HDDs could have been priced identically to the ever fluctuating price of HDDs from the direct sales channel. For a start, how could they reprice the units they'd already sold to WalMart, EBGames, and the like?

My strong hunch is that those official MS HDD's were not very profitable for MS. Otherwise one suspects they would not have tolerated hacked HDDs.

Of course if you want to say their whole strategy was dumb, I agree. Why not just allow consumers to slap the SATA drive of their choice into the 360? Bigger drives = more room for games = customers theoretically buying more games.

Don't be silly. The user would never disclose that part. It would be "My xbox doesn't work, send me a replacement"

Although the reasonable way to handle this would be for the xbox to detect non genuine drives and report it but not block them. So support would quickly see the cause of the issue.

I definitely blame the corporation for unethically making products like that in the 1st place, and then also deceitfully marketing them. There should be much stricter laws and severe punishments in place to protect the public.

Still possible with a CFW.