X Box hacking contest
 

Has anyone heard of the contest to hack into the X Box? When I was living in the Bay Area I heard about some guy in Silicon Valley that was offering a million dollar reward for the first person to hack into the X Box. I havent heard anything alse about it. Anyone know anything?

I never heard about the million dollar thing, but I do know that the x-box was hacked around 6-10 months after it's release by an MIT grad student, iirc. He was in close contact with microsoft, and doing it as a thesis.

There was a contest with an anonymous donor who promised $100.000 to anyone who could get Linux running on an X-Box.

This was indeed accomplished late last year, by modding the machine (adding/replacing a chip inside) to by-pass security measures.

At that point the contest was extended to offer an additional $100.000 for the first person/group to get linux running on an un-modified x-box machine.
IIRC this has also been accomplished.

Turns out the CEO/director/owner (or something) of Lindows was the anonymous sponsor.

NB: the secret to the security measures was found via a bug in a savegame.

It's also possible to take out the HDD in your XBox and use it as an EIDE HDD in your PC. Trust that this takes a hell of a lot of modding, but it can be done. And I actually saw that Linux on the XBox thing on TechTV. :)

-Lasereth

Right on I remember the guy had something to do with Lindows. Don't know where I heard the million dollar thing.

I never understood the whole "save game" thing. How did that mod it?

I dont understand the save game thing either

Interesting, wonder what they will come up with next.

in 007 agent under fire (Amongst others) there is a buffer overflow bug, which allowed a hacker to get the game and xbox to run some of their code and then compromise the kernel, much like the msblaster worm does.

For my home network the main gateway and firewall is an XBOX. It's running linux, has an USB ADSL modem connected to it.
And it was much cheaper than buying a normal PC... :)