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Comment by orangecat | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

Then perhaps they should avoid trying to play the hardware market instead of lawyering up to reinforce their bandaids.

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.

[1]: http://hacknmod.com/hack/top-30-wiimote-hacks-of-the-web/

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.

Isn't that a good reason Microsoft doesn't want this to work? It will show open source as good.

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.

"work closely with law enforcement"

If they do they are going to be on the wrong side of the bars.

Article 6 of the EU convention on software prohibits anything which stops you reverse engineering hardware or software for interoperability.

DMCA allows reverse engineering for interoperability or when it is for education.

Reverse engineering is educational, thus... Er. Uh. :)

Of course, once I buy that product, it becomes my product. My possession. My asset. And I would condone modification of my product.

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