3 ms·

We all start as unemployed 16 year olds living in someone's basement (I was 16 when the Wii was released, hi!). Then one of three things happens: - You have mo

We all start as unemployed 16 year olds living in someone's basement (I was 16 when the Wii was released, hi!). Then one of three things happens: - You have morals, grow up and shift into a related career (infosec whitehat or some other computer engineering thing), and optionally stay part of the community, staying well away from piracy stuff. - You end up as a government-side black hat, i.e. NSA, NSO, and its ilk. Whether this is moral, that's for you to decide. - You have no morals, embrace piracy, see the money in the business (especially if you also don't care for your users and just want to extract as money from them as possible), and join or start a commercial piracy-focused operation, i.e. modchips and such. This is the Xecuter guys (re not caring for their users, they wrote bricking code for people who tried to mess with their devices, and it had false positives). The Xecuter guys aren't the good guys. Look for the open not for profit homebrew communities if you want legitimate effort to have control over your own hardware. Xecuter just caters to pirates.

Kaze404 6y ago
This just sounds like you're saying people who disagree with you have no morals, which is an interesting way to see the world to put it mildly. Either way, not sure how it relates to my comment. I wasn't passing judgement on Team Xecuter or the comment I replied to.
scaramanga 6y ago
Or you have no morals whatsoever and decide to join the highest order children's pocket money thieves in the world. The computer games industry. There you can be exploited labour to produce a $100m budget game which makes a 50% profit margin in its first weekend and then 5 years later still ask children for $70 per copy. Or, if they're feeling charitable, they can pay you $150 to get a virtual horse or hat with the game. If you don't like how they play with the toy. You can just steal it right back out of their hands by banning them from playing it with their friends remotely. You can use your profits to lobby for laws which imprison anyone who takes the tiniest dent out of your profits and have them thrown in to prison next to terrorists and serious criminals. Or you can use it to just sue children who are curious about computers. Hi sony!
- marcan_42 6y ago
  You don't need to lecture me about Sony, seeing as I was named as a defendant in that lawsuit :-) I never said the games industry are the good guys. Certainly not Sony. Though, for comparison, Microsoft hired some of the Xbox 360 hackers, and now the Xbox One has the best security of all the consoles. Food for thought.
  - girvo 6y ago
    The Xbox One also deterred myself from even needing to look at hacking it, by allowing me to run my own code on it (with restricted functionality to be fair). Homebrew is why I was a part of the GCN scene back in the day :)
    - Kaze404 6y ago
      How does that work? Does the Xbox One have an official SDK?
      - girvo 6y ago
        https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/devkit-activation https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/devki... It’s only the UWP platform, so it’s not full access, but it’s good fun for my homebrew fiddling :)
        Kaze404 6y ago
        Whoa, that's incredible. I'm definitely getting a Series X now, thanks.
    - marcan_42 6y ago
      And the PS3 deterred all of us with PS3 Linux, until they got rid of it in a firmware update (quite likely violating consumer protection laws), after which we all started looking at it. Then it turned out all the "amazing security" of the Cell architecture boiled down to a bunch of things thrown at a wall with no sense nor reason. And Sony botched the crypto so badly they became the textbook example of how to screw up ECDSA and allow anyone to derive your private keys.
crististm 6y ago
They are precisely the type of guys with enough time on their hands to hack the consoles and resolve the business end of it, but not enough time to invest in properly securing their but (e.g. the type you find in mafia). They are _easier_ targets for criminal pursuit in this context. Portraying them as no-moral types is shallow thinking.
- marcan_42 6y ago
  I've met enough of them to know they are no-moral types. The kinds of people they hire are usually the guys taking the output of the homebrew community and building low-effort piracy tools on top. Either that, or folks just desperate to make money.

Kaze404 6y ago

This just sounds like you're saying people who disagree with you have no morals, which is an interesting way to see the world to put it mildly. Either way, not sure how it relates to my comment. I wasn't passing judgement on Team Xecuter or the comment I replied to.

scaramanga 6y ago

Or you have no morals whatsoever and decide to join the highest order children's pocket money thieves in the world. The computer games industry. There you can be exploited labour to produce a $100m budget game which makes a 50% profit margin in its first weekend and then 5 years later still ask children for $70 per copy. Or, if they're feeling charitable, they can pay you $150 to get a virtual horse or hat with the game. If you don't like how they play with the toy. You can just steal it right back out of their hands by banning them from playing it with their friends remotely. You can use your profits to lobby for laws which imprison anyone who takes the tiniest dent out of your profits and have them thrown in to prison next to terrorists and serious criminals. Or you can use it to just sue children who are curious about computers. Hi sony!

marcan_42 6y ago
You don't need to lecture me about Sony, seeing as I was named as a defendant in that lawsuit :-) I never said the games industry are the good guys. Certainly not Sony. Though, for comparison, Microsoft hired some of the Xbox 360 hackers, and now the Xbox One has the best security of all the consoles. Food for thought.
- girvo 6y ago
  The Xbox One also deterred myself from even needing to look at hacking it, by allowing me to run my own code on it (with restricted functionality to be fair). Homebrew is why I was a part of the GCN scene back in the day :)
  - Kaze404 6y ago
    How does that work? Does the Xbox One have an official SDK?
    - girvo 6y ago
      https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/devkit-activation https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/devki... It’s only the UWP platform, so it’s not full access, but it’s good fun for my homebrew fiddling :)
      - Kaze404 6y ago
        Whoa, that's incredible. I'm definitely getting a Series X now, thanks.
  - marcan_42 6y ago
    And the PS3 deterred all of us with PS3 Linux, until they got rid of it in a firmware update (quite likely violating consumer protection laws), after which we all started looking at it. Then it turned out all the "amazing security" of the Cell architecture boiled down to a bunch of things thrown at a wall with no sense nor reason. And Sony botched the crypto so badly they became the textbook example of how to screw up ECDSA and allow anyone to derive your private keys.

crististm 6y ago

They are precisely the type of guys with enough time on their hands to hack the consoles and resolve the business end of it, but not enough time to invest in properly securing their but (e.g. the type you find in mafia). They are _easier_ targets for criminal pursuit in this context. Portraying them as no-moral types is shallow thinking.

marcan_42 6y ago
I've met enough of them to know they are no-moral types. The kinds of people they hire are usually the guys taking the output of the homebrew community and building low-effort piracy tools on top. Either that, or folks just desperate to make money.