
Microsoft: Kinect wasn't hacked, USB port left open 'by design' - dfox
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/11/microsoft-kinect-not-hacked-left.html
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joezydeco
_"What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that
essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect, by design, and
reads the inputs from the sensor."_

Correct me if I'm wrong here since I don't own an Xbox360, but if the USB port
on the 360 is a PC-standard port, then the Kinect pretty much _HAS_ to obey
the standard USB spec to communicate, right? You can't pick a different way to
enumerate or present endpoints.

Short of encrypting the actual data to/from the Kinect, saying that the device
was "open by design" is kind of a semantic cop-out.

~~~
jerf
An otherwise perfectly bog-standard anything-port (USB or otherwise) can be
switched into being a non-standard port using an arbitrary electronic protocol
simply by the two endpoints negotiating a switch. This negotiation may take
place via the "core" protocol if that's necessary, or it can send something
that is a known "error" case that complaint implementations will ignore but
the secret implementations will use, or various things in between. Using an
USB connector doesn't physically obligate a USB protocol.

For some examples, look at the high speed modem wars, with various proprietary
protocols often running ahead of the standardized protocols by using various
signals to indicate that two products of the same brand should switch to a
specialized protocol. I recall a BBS I used that had a modem that was 2400bps,
unless you had a Hayes 14.4 modem. Which nobody else ever did.

~~~
dfox
You almost never have USB link that directly connects two devices (host to
function in USB parlance) except in case of PTP ("direct printing"). Any
normal tree of USB links ("bus") contains some hubs in it, which have to
understand your alternative protocol. And mayor reason why everybody uses USB
is that there is large pool of silicon implementations of almost anything and
well tested soft-IP so you don't have to spend large amounts of money on
developing hardware dedicated to connecting two devices together, this
essentially precludes anyone sane from coming up with some USB-like-but-not-
quite-USB interface with same connectors. Actually, completely opposite thing
happens now: many companies use completely standard high-speed interfaces
(USB, PCIe...) on proprietary connectors (original XBox's controllers and
memory cards, IBM/Lenovo's UltraPort/Bay, expansion ports of various mobile
devices...) or with slightly stricter tolerances (to make it slightly cheaper,
e.g. Intel's Direct Media Interface, which is essentially PCIe with less noise
imunity).

~~~
jerf
I decided against mentioning the cost factor just because it didn't seem
relevant. I certainly didn't mean that this was _likely_ , but it certainly is
_possible_ , and if it's going to happen anywhere, on a console is where it
will happen. If the Kinect did follow the original design and have onboard
processing such that the stream coming out of it might actually have been
considered proprietary by them, an inability to stick a USB hub between the
Kinect and the XBox 360 may well have been considered by them to be a feature,
not a bug.

The details of USB are mostly not germane to my point, which is that anything
can pretty much do anything the designers want. (An exception for pointing out
the hub issue, which doesn't affect all connectors.) Sure, there are
cost/benefit tradeoffs, but that's always true.

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chapel
Well it makes sense, in a loose sense you could consider what has been done as
hacking, but it seems Microsoft had a different stance on what they deemed
hacking.

That being hacking the algorithms and code that make Kinect function on the
Xbox itself, since the Kinect hardware just sends all the raw data to the
Xbox.

Anyone that wants to use the hardware has to do a lot of the work that
Microsoft has already done in making sense of the data, but that is a lot of
the challenge that people seem to enjoy. I noticed not a lot of people aren't
using the microphones. I believe that would give a lot of additional
functionality when used for sonic mapping.

------
dtf
So when can we get the specs for the microphone protocol? :-)

~~~
ShabbyDoo
Yes. If MSFT really wanted the device to be open, it would have published the
protocol specs along with some good Windows driver implementations and API
bindings for C#, etc.

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sliverstorm
You know, I realized that while Microsoft sounds insane to us geeks, this
might make sense if we consider their position and customers.

Microsoft, as best I can tell, tries to maintain a very hard line against
cheaters to keep the quality of the Xbox Live service high. If we accept this,
and the fact that most of their customers don't know a _whole_ lot about
technical things like USB, the initial push against people toying with the
Kinect (for fear that they were actually trying to _abuse_ it) and the current
repetition about how it hasn't been hacked (because it hasn't been) both make
sense.

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pingswept
So the $3000 was just for plugging it in?

