Kinect Hacked, Adafruit Bounty Won 262
scharkalvin writes "Adafruit has announced a winner to their bounty for an open source driver for the MS Kinect. From the article: 'We have verified that it works and have a screenshot from another member in the hacking community (thanks qdot!) who was also able to use the code. Congrats to Hector! He's running all this on a Linux laptop (his code works with OpenGL) and doesn't even have an Xbox!'" We talked about Adafruit's bounty yesterday.
Re:Kinect Tamper-Resistance (Score:5, Informative)
What the Kinect does have is anti-cloning. The Kinect cryptographically authenticates itself to the 360 (but not the other way around, as far as I can tell). In other words, it should be very hard to clone, but this doesn't affect efforts to use it outside of the original Xbox platform.
It seems to me like the people in charge of those Microsoft PR statements don't really know what they're talking about. Sure, there's some "security" around the Kinect (in the general sense of anti-cloning and associated Xbox updates), but as far as I can tell, no effort has been made to prevent DIY use like this. Getting it to work was comparable to getting any other proprietary USB device to work: an exercise in reverse engineering and traffic replaying, but there were no deliberate obstacles along the way.
Re:Microsoft Wanted it that way (Score:4, Informative)
Kinect is net positive and not sold at a loss.
http://www.lazygamer.net/microsoft-will-make-a-profit-on-every-kinect-sold/
Re:So... where's the motion sensing? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Microsoft Wanted it that way (Score:2, Informative)
What they said was "Suck my chair bitch, who run Ballmer town?"
Re:Tampering! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Tampering! (Score:3, Informative)
It seems to me that Belgium is punching above its weight.