"Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products," a Microsoft spokesperson told CNET. "With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant."
That's exactly what I would say if I actually did want a bunch of hackers trying to create drivers for other platforms.
This also seems like a strange thing to emphasize. Instead of pointing to the advances in motion tracking that Microsoft made to create Kinect they choose to emphasize the advances in DRM that they have made to prevent people from doing interesting things with their product.
I think this is because they sell the hardware at a loss, and have to make it up through legitimate game sales. Statements like the above are to keep the shareholders happy with a pretty bad business model. ("We give the actual hardware away, but then rape developers and users with per-game fees. We go out of business if someone breaks the DRM, but that can't happen because we're Microsoft and our DRM is unbreakable.")
While the "sold at a loss" might be true, I've also read some articles that claimed that some of the processing in the kinect hardware was being offloaded into the xbox itself. If true, this means that the drivers will need to replicate some code running on the xbox and Microsoft was rather nasty about researchers reversing some of what went on inside the running hardware.
This sort of attitude (and the business model of Draconian control over third-party developers) is unfortunately, endemic in the console gaming industry, harmful to the console gaming industry, and something Microsoft is great at (which is why they were such a good fit).
Nintendo pioneered this in the 80s, with their connector patents and weird, proprietary chips that cartridges required, learning from Atari's "mistakes" of not locking it down hard enough. They were rewarded with big sacks of money and developers that got used to the rough treatment. The industry still hasn't recovered.
It's why I love GamePark so much. Fun little handhelds and open development. I've bought two of their products so far. But they file for bankruptcy more often than Shigeru Miyamoto flashes his trademark smile; it isn't an industry that is easy to break into, and there's not much incentive for the big players to start playing nice.
Exactly. The issue here is not a battle between a belief that consumers have the right to do whatever they want with whatever signal or device they possess and the belief that consumers don't have that right. It's an issue of open vs. closed standards and ecosystems. The video game industry, and by extension consumers, have been demonstrably harmed for years by these sorts of control measures.
Consider the ethics of (a) using the Wiimote to drive my set-top box and (b) getting DirecTV without paying for it. The situations are clearly different. The former drives innovation [1], the latter doesn't.
It's funny, because having hackers get open control of Kinect would probably be the very best thing to ever happen to it.
From what I can tell Kinect is a seriously cool piece of technology without a problem to solve. Every review has been the same "it's pretty neat, but the launch titles are a bewildering array of uninteresting crap" (paraphrased of course).
Hackers are a group that are just uncanny at finding creative uses for hardware like this. Hell, I'd attribute much of the iPhone's success to those early hackers who built apps long before any official SDK was available. They pushed things in all sorts of creative directions. Apple undoubtedly learned a lot from that...Kinect needs the same.
I'm sorry, but no, Microsoft, and the world for that matter, do not work that way. Stifling open-source innovation in one small, small chunk of their bottom-line (and their gaming division is really small when compared to the behemoth that is the rest of MS) isn't even going to be on the agenda for discussion. They're stifling it because they want to control the content running on the platform (see any Apple product for why). Whether that is an acceptably smart/evil thing for MS to do is up to you, but let's not pretend it's part of the insidious crusade by the man to keep us hackers down, eh?
It isn't just open source. If I was to hack a driver for it, but not release the code and only do some sort of daemon server and documented API replicating anything it can already do, it would be the same idea.
The problem comes because the reverse engineer hackers don't have a business model to protect. It doesn't matter if that month long project doesn't return any money, because it was damn cool to do. Compare that to Microsoft who requires people to pay them money for the privilege to write code that takes advantage of it. I don't have any numbers, but a large group of small to medium game companies buy SDKs and Development tools for platforms they don't actually produce titles for. This is a significant number of people they don't want "trying" before they buy.
Nintendo didn't say or do anything, and now everyone and their brother can hook up a Wiimote to a computer and use it without issue. It doesn't seem to have negatively impacted them at all.
I'm curious as to why MS thinks that this is going to hurt them.
I didn't say it was just a webcam. I said it should cost in the ballpark of 2x of them. Adding a $1 LED with hundreds of little holes in front of it doesn't change that.
Note: I'm not making any statement about the possible awesomeness or lameness of the system. All I'm saying is the parts aren't expensive.
That's also probably true of Nintendo. I doubt the hardware has anywhere close to the revenue margins of the games themselves, or licensing games.
I think the real point in the original comment was that "serious" business is unlikely to build products competing with 360 on other platforms based on an open source driver for Kinect. E.g. Activision are extremely unlikely to build video games for PC based that require a Kinect.
While there might be a small cost to Microsoft in selling a few Kinect bundles to hackers who don't have, and therefore buy games for, XBox 360 in the grand scheme of things it's hardly a threat to Mircosoft's new business model and this is just the standard corporate answer to anyone tampering with their products.
This is not true with Nintendo. They're anti-loss leader. Their philosophy calls for them to turn a profit on everything they do. Here's a quick blurb about it:
Not to be too pedantic, but I deliberately choose my wording. I didn't say Nintendo made a loss on the hardware I said it likely has worse profit margins than selling games on their platform.
Selling hardware may not actually hurt them, but it obviously their goal is to create a platform on which to upsell games.
Nobody's saying it isn't their right. But, it's also my right to criticize their decision as being irrational, mean-spirited, or whatever. I do question whether Microsoft should have a "right" under the DMCA to prevent me from reverse engineering their protocols though. However, that's not an argument specific to any one product encumbered with anti-circumvention schemes.
I agree (up to the point where people try to start businesses based on circumvention techniques), but note that Microsoft actually doesn't have the right under DMCA to stop people from researching ways to break Kinect.
I for one would be delighted if someone were to start a business making the razors-and-razorblades business model untenable.
It's anticompetitive, distortionary, harms interoperability, and tempts businesses into spending endless amounts of money in an arms race that could better be spent making their products better.
I'm an entrepreneur. I work in a field notorious for generating a feeling of entitlement among laypeople.
So, I have a hard time sympathizing with arguments that boil down to "if company X makes cool peripheral Y, I am entitled to use it in way Z that is contrary to X's business interests".
My unfounded suspicion is that if the tables were turned, and Microsoft focused its (considerable!) systems research capabilities on, say, disrupting Wattvision's business model, Hacker News wouldn't be leaping to the defense of forced interoperability.
There are certainly markets where it basically isn't possible to make a living pricing things at marginal cost, which is why we have copyright law. There are also markets with large sunk research costs (i.e. the Kinect) where there needs to be a mechanism to recoup them, which is why we have patent law.
So I'm not particularly sympathetic to people feel like they shouldn't have to pay for a copy of something just because the marginal cost is zero. Leaving aside details like perpetual copyrights on the installment plan, we have a decent legal framework that only works if everyone contributes (cf. taxes).
But game consoles, to borrow your phrasing, are a field notorious for generating a feeling of entitlement among corporations. Same with printer cartridges, mobile phones, and, yes, razorblades. There is no societal need for these pricing schemes when we have an efficient consumer credit market, and they're frankly anticompetitive.
Society benefits from competitive markets, and competitive markets work best when things are forced to be priced at what they're worth. So I would argue that society benefits when loss-leader schemes are rendered infeasible.
"if company X makes cool peripheral Y, I am entitled to use it in way Z that is contrary to X's business interests".
Er, yes? Claiming the opposite eviscerates property rights even more than the DMCA already does.
My unfounded suspicion is that if the tables were turned, and Microsoft focused its (considerable!) systems research capabilities on, say, disrupting Wattvision's business model, Hacker News wouldn't be leaping to the defense of forced interoperability.
Barring antitrust issues I have no legal or moral issues with that.
Sure, there's another side to this, but it's not a valid side. Your side merely capitalizes on the present legal murkiness of the software/copyright issue. Console manufacturers, phone manufacturers, and a legion of other device manufacturers have spent three decades capitalizing on abuses of patent and copyright law.
Patents exist not to lock out competition or allow total control over an invention, but as a method for making sure your work isn't stolen (for a limited time) and thus give you a commercial incentive to innovate. It is outright abuse to say that it gives anyone the right to dictate how devices are used, but is sadly an abuse that has become the status quo.
You write as if Microsoft discovered the Kinect, maybe deep inside some ancient system of caves, and now is hoarding them for their own nefarious purposes.
That's just branding. There hasn't been consumer noticeable technological advancement in that market in probably 20 years or more. Honestly, is 10 blades going to increase my quality of life?
Even if so, unless someone comes out with a fantastic hack that goes completely mainstream- the potential damage is low. Most people who buy one will also buy the games.
I can't recall where or when I read it, but there was some talk that Kinect might also be used in an office setting. Microsoft may well be thinking about it and having an open source driver going around might cut into their plans they could have for Kinect.
Edit:
Kinect is part of Microsoft’s continuing quest to bring to market natural user interface (NUI) technologies, like touch, voice and gesture-recognition. Maybe it’s also part of a grand plan to force users to continue to exercise (even if that just means by waving a hand) while being increasingly tied to our PCs?
You'd still have to buy the Kinect. And, I'd think, having useful Kinect-compatible software from other sources increases the value offered by the device, compared with what it would be if only Microsoft's software used it.
Microsoft probably wants to continue with the razors & razorblades model of the XBox. So, maybe it wants to extract a toll from 3rd parties who produce products for the platform. No different really than the iPhone.
I don't necessarily agree with DMCA restrictions on reverse engineering, but I do support Microsoft's right to sell a closed platform.
On the other hand, how cool would it be to wave your hand in front of your computer to mute it, or to flip through slides by moving your hands back and forth? Think less full-body motions and more simply tracking the position of hands, allowing for touch-screen like interactions without actually needing to touch the screen. There are lots of things I can see this being really useful for (especially 3d modeling; I recently saw an article about an iPad program which lets you model as if you were working with clay, and I would love to have something like that for my PC).
Waving with my hands will be so much easier then pressing the Down key?
All the applications you name really depend on how accurate the Kinect really turns out to be.
Back on the first hand, how frustrating would it be to have the Kinect changing slides for you every time you gesture at the screen?
In general, though, yes, I think there is a lot of room for improvement in the technology that supports presenters (but that's still no reason not to practice and get comfortable with the tech you have)
I agree, up to the point where someone might try to start a business on Kinect reversing. It was hamhanded for MSFT's spokesperson to invoke law enforcement.
I don't think it is different. What's sleazy about printer cartridges isn't the lock-in, it's the teaser price on the printer made up for with the artificially inflated price of the cartridge.
My comment, or the comment I'm responding to? Preemptively: The fact that what I actually believe flies in the face of the conventional wisdom on Hacker News does not make it a trolling comment.
Porn industry adapts open source Kinect drivers into new, immersible adult entertainment experience. Act in one of your favorite movies and get "intimate" with your favorite porn stars.
Dirty minds think alike, apparently. I proposed this very thing to my friend yesterday. He just got a Kinect and I was joking with him about the potential this has for the porn industry.
I did initially get downvoted but I think the implications for that adult entertainment industry with Kinect are huge.
As some may know, the POV (point of view) genre in adult entertainment is a huge segment. Being able to act in the movies and dictate the positions and movements of the actor would be a big marketing driver
They're "furious"? I don't get that. What I get is "If necessary, we're going to outspend Limor by roughly two orders of magnitude on this problem alone"; based on the caliber of people MSFT has ready access to, I'd put my chips on Microsoft in this arms race.
No corporation has ever shut out the hackers. In every machine ever built, if hackers want to control it they will. Especially if they're allowed to take the machine home.
What makes you think this case is any different? Microsoft can't keep Office or Windows under wraps, nor the XBOX, nor anything else.
Patently false. For one example: DirecTV shut out the off-the-shelf smartcard hackers.
You're falling into a narrative trap. It's not actually "hackers vs. Microsoft". Microsoft pays some of the best in the world. Most examples of hackers beating companies involve companies that did not invest seriously in countermeasures. That's not a problem Microsoft has.
That's not quite the same situation as hardware hacking - DirectTV's countermeasures basically come down to detecting fraud and disabling the users, not preventing it completely.
What just about all consumer electronics companies have failed to do is lock down their hardware from being hacked in the first place - after all, Sony and Apple also pay some of the best in the world, and the PS3 and iPhone have been cracked wide open with software.
Microsoft is certainly better than most (the 360 doesn't yet have a software patch - there are hardware solutions - that can be used for piracy), but they are by no means immune to hackers.
I believe you're wrong about the nature of DirectTV's countermeasures, although we may be in a semantic tar pit here. The measures DirectTV took to stop the emulators were very, very technical; they involve encryption at the level of HDL.
I don't really see the difference. The Kinect is a piece of plastic and lead-free solder that you buy. DirectTV is a radio transmission that they broadcast into your house.
Once the Kinect is in my house, who cares what I do with it? I can smash it with a hammer, I can send it USB commands. My Kinect, my house, my rules.
DirectTV is the same. Once the radio waves are in my house, why can't I decrypt them to watch TV for free? If DirectTV wants me to pay for TV, why are they sending the signal into my house!?
I completely agree in terms of ethics and what the legalities should be. In terms of what's possible to do, and to do so easily, the satellite TV vendors have managed to stay neck-and-neck with those trying to watch TV for free, precisely because of little details like being able to alter the format and update the software to work with it.
The difference between cell phones and DirectTV is that you have session keys for your phone calls, but there is one global key for every user in the country for DirectTV. Such is the nature of broadcasting.
They chose a "cheap" method to distribute TV to users, but it's also very "insecure". The cell-phone companies, on the other hand, developed a very expensive infrastructure, and it's more secure as a result.
I don't see the difference between hacking the machine that makes DirecTV work and the machine that makes Kinect work, but since we're a community of nerds, I'm sure there's at least 1223 distinctions to be drawn here.
The utility of DirecTV is the service it provides. The box has no utility per se. Because being able to receive DirecTV's service is dependant on having compatible software, there has to be some way for the box (hacked or not) to receive updates. If the pirates don't patch, they lose their utility.
The utility of Kinect is a physical piece of equipment. There's no service (although it may be used with a service), therefore there's no requirement to receive updates once hacked. Microsoft only gets one chance to deploy their defences: when the Kinect is in the factory.
You apparently think the Pay TV providers can issue new smart cards on a semiregular basis. No, they can't. They operate under approximatelly the same constraint Microsoft does; updates to their core protection scheme are ludicrously expensive.
(Microsoft could use the exact same scheme by bricking their devices with fuses when they fail some routine checkup; they could also brick every device and then issue a recall/reissue. They have better options than that, though).
I don't follow. People used to hack DirecTV machines to receive the service for free. DirecTV detected that, and shut all those people down. How much does it cost today to obtain a device that gets free pay-per-view?
There are still people that do it, so far as I understand, but it is a dedicated bunch and takes enough time that it's not something that will easily be in the hands of people that don't have intimate knowledge of the systems.
It used to cost $150? to get unlimited free pay-per-view. I know; I had a hacked card (we paid for DTV, but I liked being able to record The Simpsons from every local network carried on DTV, back when The Simpsons was actually decent).
(b) Limor isn't putting a bounty on pirating a game. She's putting a bounty on forced interoperability with a hostile proprietary peripheral. The bounty is great (even though I think "her team" will lose). I think it's kind of insulting to compare it to pirating games, which is indefensible.
If I understand this comment correctly, that's pretty much not at all the way DirecTV works. The people who "broke" DirecTV in the '90s didn't do it by hacking into DirecTV's servers.
It just means that the usual arms race between defenders and attackers isn't as clear-cut as it is when both the peripheral and the host are sitting in your living room or lab.
No, I'm serious: the arms race we're talking about in DirecTV's case happened entirely in the living room.
They did something with consumer hardware that made tampering with it economically infeasible.
The exact same technique they use is available to Microsoft, should they be willing to pay to integrate and (more painfully) license it.
What Pay TV providers did to stop Pay TV hackers is an open secret, but I don't work in Pay TV and don't know exactly how "open" the secret is, which is why I'm dancing around this argument rather than just killing it with facts.
Some of the best. And most of the best are "out there" and not on their payroll. Plus it's not impossible that some of these supposed best on their payroll may also contribute, on the side, to helping hack/crack their products, anonymously. Regardless though, I bet for every 1 world-class hacker inside Microsoft there are 100+ outside of it, and some of the latter will have the interest and time and skills to hack it.
As with much security "win" is relative. If Microsoft can keep the hackers at bay until their next console release (or, perhaps the subsequent release) they will have essentially "won".
As someone who as sunk considerable amounts of time into PS3 hacking I can say that sony do a pretty good job. Not initially, but their current firmware (3.5) is pretty closed.
This is all because they want o put Kinect into Windows and mobile as a competitive advantage agains other desktop and phone platforms. Xbox is to make consumers familiar with it
So it's a "Reverse Apple". Apple sold much hardware on the basis of their software's appeal (going to lengths to prevent people running OS X on generic hardware); Microsoft wants to sell software on the basis of their hardware's appeal (so they need to prevent people using their hardware with other software).
What I don't get is why they care. It's not gonna be popular on other platforms unless the other platforms build in interface support for the Kinect capacities. Having drivers is interesting for hackers and researchers, but sales to those guys are never going to be a drop in the bucket of normal sales.
If "might is right" is the ethical/legal regime we're all going to be working under, you realize Microsoft has access to talent of the same caliber as Bunnie Huang, and in significantly larger quantities?
These arguments make sense if you believe that "DRM" (software protection) has lost the technological war. But it hasn't! You just don't see the high-end stuff deployed in places where hackers care about it --- with the possible exception of the hypervisor-secured game consoles.
This assumes that "talent" is a magical dust that makes everything better when you sprinkle it on. I have a few counterarguments:
1. No doubt there are incredibly intelligent, motivated people working for Microsoft, but talent requires an appropriate environment to reach its potential.
2. The mistake is often made of assuming that the "good guys" are the only ones with smart people on their side. This mistake is most frequently seen in discussions of national security and nuclear technology.
3. All it takes to defeat a non-service-based DRM scheme is one vulnerability. If the Kinect has to continually stream motion data to Microsoft servers for processing (kind of like Android speech recognition), then Microsoft can keep changing the protocol and encryption. If Microsoft's 100 talented engineers leave just one gap, and one talented hacker finds it, then hackers "win."
4. "Might makes right" should absolutely apply to what talented hackers do with products they own. I value individual property rights above corporate business model preservation. It is the duty of the giant and powerful corporations to ensure their business models aren't vulnerable to the whims of talented hackers, and using the law to make it so is unethical.
Apologies for the poor formatting. I forgot that I have to use \n\n instead of just \n to get new paragraphs, and ran into maxvisit so I couldn't change it before the editing window closed.
That's why I added the final clause of item 4, "and using the law to make it so is unethical." I don't blame you if you didn't make it that far with the botched formatting. It's also worth noting that I'm commenting on how I believe things should be, not how they are. "Might makes right" currently has hackers ~= Microsoft, but Microsoft+lawyers+lobbyists >> hackers.
> These arguments make sense if you believe that "DRM" (software protection) has lost the technological war. But it hasn't! You just don't see the high-end stuff deployed in places where hackers care about it --- with the possible exception of the hypervisor-secured game consoles.
Where is it, then? And if it's where I think it is, don't most such places keep tight control of their hardware? (As opposed to letting random consumers buy and own it.)
Fair enough, but I wouldn't consider any of those to be "won" as if nobody's ever going to hack them.
BD+ in particular, I thought some commercial program was already able to emulate. And I haven't heard of any movies where there are no pirated versions available, but I don't watch them at all, so I might be out of the loop.
And mere Blu-Ray (for those disks without BD+), is pretty well cracked at this point if one is to believe the hexadecimal numbers going around the internet.
If "might is right" is the ethical/legal regime we're all going to be working under, you realize Microsoft has access to talent of the same caliber as Bunnie Huang, and in significantly larger quantities?
$2,000 seems low, really. The people who would be intrigued in this situation are doing it for the challenge and the glory. Two thousand would be an OK cherry on top, but if you really want to sweeten the deal, I bet with a Kickstarter you could get ten times that amount.
IMO MS could offer $10,000 to any developer who delivers the exact same thing to them only giving MS complete ownerhip over the code. That would entice anyone working on it to go for the bigger bucks and give them legal recourse if the same code appeared as opensource.
Of course that could start a bidding war, and draw more attention, and no doubt encourage more hackers... so actually never mind, probably a really bad idea.
The type of people who normally do this sort of stuff do it for free. The sort of people who do this kind of stuff because of the publicity being generated have the tendancy to not even do it for free, but to refuse any prize money offered to them. A large portion of bug bounties paid out to people who find bugs are gifted to the EFF for example.
A 10k bounty to not release this might stop a few people from doing so, but all it takes is for a single individual to say "fuck it, I have a steady job and a nice place to live, giving MS the finger is worth more than just a measily 10k to me", and it's game over. Once that single person releases their work microsoft has paid out (no doubt numerous times) 10k for absolutely nothing.
Being able to put this down on your resume could possibly overshadow any possible lump sum that would be offered. Long term, this is possibly chump change if you factor in what it could do for you career wise long term.
Also, I wouldn't be doing this for the money and I doubt many would. You do it because you want to, it's fun, hacking on things like this is just plain enjoyable.
Adafruit Industries should start a fundraising campaign on kickstarter.com or a similar site and aim for the kind of run-away success that Diaspora had in their fundraising efforts. More publicity, more money, more developers ... angrier Microsoft!
The bounty is nothing but a PR stunt - they might as well offer $50k, it's very unlikely anyone will ever claim it. The XBOX 360 and their official(ly licensed) peripherals are protected by TPM style infineon chips that do cryptographically secure mutual authentication and protocol encryption (as needed). These chips are very tamper resistant, requiring a state sponsored level of sophistication to physically remove private keys that are never exposed outside of the chip dye. Or an exposure of the original microsoft signing keys for the xbox project which are undoubtedly closely controlled and are never required to be exposed to 3rd party developers (except, perhaps, infineon).
The exposure of such keys or a process to avoid the use of them would be of significantly more value to software bootleggers, unlicensed peripheral manufacturers and homebrew folks than any amount of money this open source group is likely to offer. And they'd be requiring a fully functional driver for a set of complex hardware with no documentation on top of the cryptographic attack. Nobody on earth would do all that work to claim that bounty. Not to mention, defeating the protections would surely fall under the DMCA circumvention rules, meaning revealing the coders identity would open them up to significant legal risk.
While it's fun blame microsoft for their behavior, it should be noted that this kind of peripheral protection is becoming significantly more common. Among others, I'm under the impression that this style of on chip cryptographic protections drives the new class of "made for iPhone" officially licensed bluetooth enabled gadgets and certain other "made for iPhone" hardware. I'm unsure if they use as tamper proof a solution, but the intent is the same.
It will be curious to see what unlocking the drivers for the Kinect will actually do. If there's no semblance of an API from the device, it might just be giving you back raw data. With the Wiimote, that's more manageable since you're only dealing with 3 axes. With a crazy point cloud, it could be tough to infer anything from the data. I think I read somewhere that the Kinect handles a lot of this on its own though...
How much of what Kinect does is done in hardware, and how much of the vision solve is done in software? the "drivers" might be a huge undertaking if it just gives you the raw input from the cameras.
If my understanding of the device is marginally accurate, I understand it offloads almost all of the processing to the 360. So, I would imagine the raw data coming out of it is like getting raw input from 64 mice at the same time. If anything is done directly on the device, it is probably "stabilization", like muting the background and focusing on a central moving object, but actual tracking and number crunching is done off of it.
Here's a video of a guy looking at his room with IR goggles. This observation makes me think that there is a Lot of data to be crunched to get an accurate use of it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7nRKU0nFxA
"Modification of its products" "Product tampering"
So if I write a linux device driver for a USB mouse with a proprietary interface, I am "tampering" with the mouse and "modifying" it?
This is a human interface device. I highly doubt that even the DCMA could kick in on it, since it is not used for recording, storing, or displaying content of any kind (but I could be wrong). How, then, does Microsoft have the right to say what can and cannot be done with a piece of hardware that I rightfully purchased?
Whether the Kinect is a loss leader is irrelevant. Once I buy the thing, I own it, and I can do whatever I want to with it.
That's exactly what I would say if I actually did want a bunch of hackers trying to create drivers for other platforms.