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Comment by treesciencebot | Hacker News Reader

Modern XBOX Series X and S has very nice hardware (custom AMD APUs) for a really really discounted price. I wonder when or if they can be bricked enough to be a viable linux computer that can be sold for ~250$ ish with a great performance.

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This is use of the word "bricked" which is a novel inverse of my normal understanding. To me a "bricked" device has been corrupted in core boot so bad, even JTAG may not get it back. It's the unusable state.

"rooted" is the more normal description of 'I got to install some code on it which the original vendor did not want me to be able to install' surely?

Or has geek english moved on to invert the greybeard meaning of "bricked" ?

Thank You. Sorry about not adding to the discussion.

This talk[1] was interesting watch wrt that. They made DRAM encrypted and Secure Boot seems to be done right too…

1: https://youtu.be/U7VwtOrwceo

There's consumer boards with xbox one and xbox series SoCs out there with the GPU fused off already. They won't ever be hacked, security is tight and the scene essentially doesn't exist anymore.

I have an Xbox One X that would be nice as a second PC. Even if it was an irreversible process that allowed me to install Windows, it would at least keep it out of the landfill for a little while longer.

XBoneX would make for a nice dedicated Left4Dead box.

You can also stream your PC games to the Xbox:

https://www.purexbox.com/news/2021/02/guide_how_to_mirror_yo...

I think a modded PS4 fits the shoe quite well, if you ignore the need to run a web browser exploit each time you want to boot Linux (like a "semi-untethered jailbreak" for the iOS nerds)

Moreover, it has GPU that was every cryptominers wanted to get and use. Since it's still not hacked, it seems to extremely hard to hack. It was $$$ profit for mining farm.

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