Haven't seen this posted yet. Thought it was an interesting article.
https://www.wired.com/story/xbox-underground-videogame-hackers/
More at the link.
https://www.wired.com/story/xbox-underground-videogame-hackers/
David, who was in the passenger seat, was startled by the question. Xenon was one of his online aliases, a pseudonym he often used—along with Xenomega and DeToX—when playing Halo or discussing his Xbox hacking projects with fellow programmers. Why would that nickname, familiar to only a handful of gaming fanatics, pop up when his passport was checked?
Pokora's puzzlement lasted a few moments before he remembered that he'd named his one-man corporation Xenon Development Studios; the business processed payments for the Xbox service he operated that gave monthly subscribers the ability to unlock achievements or skip levels in more than 100 different games. He mentioned the company to the customs agent, making sure to emphasize that it was legally registered. The agent instructed the Pokoras to sit tight for just a minute longer.
As Pokora began to immerse himself in programming, his family bought its first Xbox. With its ability to connect to multiplayer sessions on the Xbox Live service and its familiar Windows-derived architecture, the machine made Pokora's Super Nintendo seem like a relic. Whenever he wasn't splattering aliens in Halo, Pokora scoured the internet for technical information about his new favorite plaything. His wanderings brought him into contact with a community of hackers who were redefining what the Xbox could do.
To divine its secrets, these hackers had cracked open the console's case and eavesdropped on the data that zipped between the motherboard's various components—the CPU, the RAM, the Flash chip. This led to the discovery of what the cryptography expert Bruce Schneier termed "lots of kindergarten security mistakes." For example, Microsoft had left the decryption key for the machine's boot code lying around in an accessible area of the machine's memory. When an MIT graduate student named Bunnie Huang located that key in 2002, he gave his hacker compatriots the power to trick the Xbox into booting up homebrew programs that could stream music, run Linux, or emulate Segas and Nintendos. All they had to do first was tweak their consoles' firmware, either by soldering a so-called modchip onto the motherboard or loading a hacked game-save file from a USB drive.
More at the link.
