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Comment by daeken | Hacker News Reader

The truly sad thing about the state of console security for the past few generations is that as they lock them down more, it becomes significantly easier to play pirated games than to use homebrew content. With both the Xbox 360 and the Wii, it took (very) simple drive authentication hacks to get pirated content to run, but many manhours (probably in the high single-digit manyears, honestly) to get homebrew on either of them.

At the end of the day, it's infinitely easier to make a drive say "oh, yes, that disc is clearly on original materials" than to subvert, say, signature checks for code authentication, as required for homebrew code. The console manufacturers really screwed themselves here.

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Very true, for those interested -

Xbox: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fOjGLCctEY&hd=1

Xbox 360: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxjpmc8ZIxM&hd=1

PS3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4loZGYqaZ7I&hd=1

Wii: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z81BCko-UY&hd=1

If wonder if with the rumored always-on Internet requirement for the next Xbox, it will spur the creation of a ton of private servers for Xbox games, with most next-gen Xbox players playing pirated games on those private servers, instead of the expensive always-on DRM'ed games from the Xbox store. I figure this should be that much easier with the next Xbox using PC hardware.

It would be quite ironic if by forcing always-on DRM on users, the next Xbox becomes the most hacked/with most pirated games console ever.

Given that the Xbox 360 was damn near bulletproof (there have been very few attacks against it, even still), I expect that the next generation is going to be an even bigger step up, not a step backwards. If you can't compromise code running on the device, then you're not going to be able to inject new cert chains and be able to MITM connections or use private servers, as I strongly doubt that they'll mess up those handshakes.

This won't kill homebrew nor piracy, but it's going to put a massive dent in both. Nothing is unbreakable in theory, but when the cost of a break raises to a certain point, it's effectively unbreakable in practice; they're rapidly approaching that point, if they haven't hit it already.

All of this makes me pretty sad, really. I'm no supporter of piracy, and I don't generally use homebrew software, but I'm going to miss the challenge of breaking consoles. I remember sitting in my apartment in San Diego back in early 2006, with bunnie and a couple other guys, modifying shaders on the King Kong demo from the kiosk disc in an attempt to read out memory from the 360 and display it. I didn't have much interaction with the 360 scene after that stuff, but sitting around and coming up with angles of attack with the best and brightest in the console community was just amazingly fun.

What do you mean by bulletproof? 99% of all Xbox 360's here in Uruguay are hacked - maybe what you mean is that all of them were through the same exploit/attack?.

I can see that they must have raised security A LOT, but it seems it hasn't stopped the pirates.

> 99% of all Xbox 360's here in Uruguay are hacked

as in they flashed the disc reader's firmware to have it say 'yes, this is a legit disc', which does not invalidate the fact that the code on the disc is signed.

> What do you mean by bulletproof?

bulletproof as in even partial access to the hardware to execute random, sideloaded, unsigned code on the CPU is extremely involved, if at all possible.

Thanks for the clarification :) .

From a practical purpose, it doesn't sound bulletproof, but for the homebrew community it sure does.

That rumour has been debunked several times by journalists. To be fair, their debunking is also a rumour, but it's still good to keep that in mind.

"Under Microsoft's current guidelines, which may still be changed, the decision of whether a game will require an internet connection to work and if that is a one-time authentication or a constant connection, will be left up to individual publishers."

source: http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/26/4268782/next-xbox-drm-achie...

"The console manufacturers really screwed themselves here."

In what way exactly? Would enabling homebrew in some way subert piracy? You can make games for 360 if you want through their indie games platform for a mere $100.

You could argue that enabling homebrew would sell more hardware and/or software I suppose. Is that your argument? That 360 would have been more successful for Microsoft if it allowed homebrew?

the PlayStation 3 remained unhacked until Sony retroactively removed home brew functionality, and created a lot of interest in doing so.

Ah, so we agree. Microsoft did not screw themselves in any way from their decisions. Excellent.

No that is quite clearly not what was stated, please take the disingenuous bs elsewhere.

The example given was that for both the 360 and Wii it took simple authentication hacks to run pirated content but vast amounts of work to run homebrew. It was then claimed this decision making screwed the console manufacturers. You brought up an example of a different platform (ps3) and a different situation (did support homebrew, then stopped).

I'm still waiting to hear how Microsoft and/or Nintendo screwed themselves exactly.

This is why I like an open console like the OUYA (which I should be receiving any day now).

I would like it more if it was a true console with no yearly refreshes.

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