Hacking the Xbox

Prologue - README.1ST 9
paper because I had nothing to lose, and because I believed in making a
statement about my rights as a hacker. Unfortunately, there is a silent
majority of hackers out there who have families to feed and jobs to lose,
and not everyone can be so fortunate as to have the EFF helping them out.
This book you are reading is yet another example of how the DMCA has a
chilling effect on free speech. Originally commisioned by the technical
publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., this book was cancelled in the last
hour over fears of lawsuits and backlash from Microsoft. Such censorship
is frustrating and discouraging, and perhaps some authors would
have stopped there and allowed their voice to be silenced by fear. I am
taking the legal and financial risk of self-publishing this book to make a
statement about my right to free and unimpeded speech as a hacker. Even
this path is not free of impediments, however. The book pre-order
process was suspended on its second day because the original e-commerce
provider, Americart, “declined to offer [me] cart service for
selling hacker materials . . . $15 per month doesn’t pay for us to take the
risk of being named in a DMCA suit.”
I must emphasize that this book does not infringe on Microsoft’s
copyrights, and the knowledge presented in this book cannot be directly
applied to copyright circumvention. To perform an infringing act, one
would have to hone their skills and apply a substantial amount of
additional art and know-how aimed specifically at copyright control
circumvention. To claim that this book is a circumvention tool would be
tantamount to claiming that all books about circuit boards, embedded
software or cryptography are also circumvention tools.
The scope of the DMCA with respect to the “fair use” of hardware is
another important political topic with enormous economic repercussions. Is
it illegal to modify or circumvent a cryptographically secured boot sequence
for the purpose of running alternate, legitimately purchased or created,
software? This question may be decided in part by the fate of Xbox hackers.
A strict interpretation of the reverse engineering exemption of the DMCA 7
reveals strong arguments for making such acts of circumvention illegal.
In particular, reverse engineering is only allowed for interoperability,
where interoperability means “the ability of computer programs to
exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the
information which has been exchanged.” But this definition contains two
potential land mines: First, circumventing hardware-based security
measures is arguably different from circumventing a program’s (software)
security measures. It may not be a very strong argument technically, but
the clause has yet to be legally tested, to the best of my knowledge.
Second, the purpose is not really to exchange information with the
hardware security measures — it is to bypass them.
The final argument against allowing the reverse engineering of the
hardware security mechanisms is incidental copyright circumvention. The
7 17 U.S.C § 1201(f), Reverse Engineering