Book of the Week: Hacking the Xbox

13 Sep 2014

This week I read Hacking the Xbox, written by bunnie huang. He hacked the xbox while he was a PhD student in electrical engineering at MIT. After Aaron Swartz took his own life, bunnie made his book free to download in Aaron’s memory. Aaron was threatened by lawsuits from publishing companies trying to protect their copyrights on academic research journals. This would be a book I would give to an eager young mind wanting to get into electronics. Academic Publishing Academic publishing stinks. The government gives grants through the NSF, DoD and NIH to conduct research. Part of the grant budget includes fees that researchers have to pay to get their papers into journals. Academic organizations also pay subscription fees to the journals for access to articles. If they want to make the articles accessible to the general population for free, they need to pay even more fees to the publishing companies. When they download the pdfs of the articles, there are also ads on the page. If this seems broken to you, it is. academic publishing is ripe for disruption. Aaron was trying to free the information that tax dollars paid for. Aaron was trying to set knowledge free. Although that does not make what he did legal. Xbox Security Microsoft went to great lengths to secure the Xbox, so people couldn’t use it as a cheap PC. They even put a fake ROM chip with filled with apparent booting instructions to throw off would be hackers. Ultimately persistence and a community sharing their insights lead to the breaking of Xbox security letting anyone run their own software on the Xbox.