Today is a very bad day for Microsoft. If you haven’t been following the news, a group of Austrian hackers worked out a buffer overflow (or under run, not sure yet but the particulars don’t really matter) that allows anyone to run unsigned code on their xbox. This means that shortly the xbox will be ‘owned’ in the same way that the Sega Dreamcast was – anyone will be able to run cracked games, linux, BSD, whatever they want, on their xbox, without having to install a mod chip or make other hardware modifications to their system.

Can you guess my reaction to this? I’m cackling gleefully! Firstly because I love to see MS take one on the chin, secondly because I had been considering dropping ~$100 on parts to mod my xbox so I could get it to play media files of all flavors (.ogg, DivX and so on) and stream music across my lan to the stereo system. Now I don’t have to pay for the right to install whatever software I want on my machine.

It will be interesting to see what steps microsoft will take. Certainly they’ll be trying to sue the hell out of the Austrians for releasing the hack to the public, that’s a given. But what will they do to try and save the xbox? If anyone can run cracked games the third party software developers will start abandoning the platform like crazy, just like the did on the Dreamcast. MS can presumably release a hardware update to the platform to fix the exploit, but that won’t help with the 6-9 million xboxes already sold, and at this stage in the platform’s life that’s probably more than half the xboxes that will be sold during the product’s lifespan. They can try and use Xbox live access to control who’s running the hack or to try and ‘fix’ hacked boxes, but that reminds me of the code war the sattelite TV companies have been waging with hackers for a decade – you can stop some of hacked hardware some of the time, but not all of it.

Interesting, interesting times for the xbox. Glad I grabbed an early model before any hardware updates are fashioned. If you had been considering picking up an xbox, now might be the time to do it. Of course it’s also possible MS’s reaction will be a slow ‘fuck! we’re fucked! Time to cut our losses and bail,’ which would lead to $100 xboxes by next spring, but I really doubt this is the route they’ll go, they have too much money tied up in the success of the xbox (literally billions) to cut and run, not to mention the loss in credibility they’d suffer.

It will also be really interesting to see what happens with the software developers – EA in particular has been pissed at MS for a while now, it’s not beyond the pale to imagine them saying ‘no more software for xbox’ – if that happens the cascade effect will be brutal, most developers will follow suit.

I’ll post followups as they occur, and I guarantee I’ll have my xbox booting linux within the next month or two.

Oh, if you’re interested in a summary of all this, check out zdnet’s article on the subject.