Microsoft: We Left Kinect's USB Port Unprotected on Purpose
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Microsoft has apparently reversed its hard-stance course against hacking its Kinect motion-tracking add-on for the Xbox 360. Sort-of.
To Microsoft, it's all a question of semantics. To them, "hacking" the Kinect implies that someone has created a third-party mechanism that sits between the add-on and the Xbox 360 to propagate game cheating or something to that effect. That hasn't happened yet, said Microsoft's Alex Kipman on NPR's Science Friday show this past week.
"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," he said. "The sensor has eyes and ears, and that's a whole lot of noise that someone needs to take and turn into signal."
The idea that Microsoft purposely left the Kinect's USB connection open for open-source experimentation is a bit of a departure from the company's earlier comments this month in response to Adafruit Industries' $2,000 "Hack the Kinect" competition. The contest required budding coders to release open-source drivers that successfully capture video and depth information from the device.
"Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products," said a company spokesperson in an interview with 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."
In response, Adafruit upped its bounty to $3,000. Now, whether Microsoft has truly had a change of heart, or whether Adafruit's successful contest (and Google engineer Matt Cutts' subsequent follow-up contest, featuring two $1,000 prizes) has convinced the company that open-sourcing software that interfaces with Kinect is an inevitable conclusion, we'll never know. Regardless of the reasoning, Adafruit is certainly celebrating the outcome.
"Congrats to everyone in the open source community, in about one week we turned 'work closely with law enforcement' to 'inspired' by community finding new uses for Kinect," reads the company's blog.
The winner of the $3,000 Adafruit bounty, a man named Hector, plans to donate his winnings back to the "hacking" community at-large to support tweaks of Nintendo's Wii/Wiimotes, the iPhone Dev Team, and a few other groups that he allegedly works with. Hardware hacking can be an expensive proposition, after all.
