It's been one day short of a full week since the Xbox One hit store shelves, and in that amount of time, people with a considerably more time and knowledge than yours truly have managed to pry their way into a product Microsoft spent years and millions of dollars designing. Doesn't say much for the company, really, other then the fact that maybe they should consider hiring these guys. The Xbox One has been hacked, and its NAND dumped out for the world to see.
It sounds dramatic, but tech-talk can be a bit difficult to sexify. "What's NAND" you ask? You could Google it, but since you're already reading this, it's a type of flash memory that doesn't require power to retain information. Just who cracked the console is unknown, but Konsole Junkies is reporting the discoveries about the NAND. My German's considerably rustier than my Spanish, as it's basically non-existent, but GearNuke sums it up quite nicely:
"the size of the NAND present on Xbox One is 4.9GB in size. It was also revealed that NAND can be dumped using Corona V2 using SD Card reader just as with the Xbox 360. However, to do so, the crystal or 'quartz' needs to be disabled. It was also mentioned that J-Runner 'may not' be used for dumping as it limits the size to 3.5GB on Corona."
If you understood that, good for you. Me? It just stirs up a thirst as I do love me a nice cold Corona.
The potential ramifications of this hack are exactly the sort of thing Microsoft (and dozens of other developers and publishers) were praying against, and why the company was considering the ever vilified "always online DRM" in the first place. Namely, folks are that much closer to making their consoles able to read homebrew games. Not just games that creative folks personally design in their free time, but games that less than savory individuals grab from the countless torrent sites that litter the 'net because they think they're entitled to them.
Thanks to a famous hacker by the name of 'C4eva' dumping the Xbox One version of Call of Duty: Ghosts online, it means the beginning of a possible death knell for Microsoft's next-gen console, and things will likely get worse before they get better for the Cupertino crew.
Provided Microsoft's still a major player when the next line of consoles come out, backlash or not, don't expect Microsoft to be listening nearly as closely to the rabid complaints over "always online DRM." Somewhere out there, Adam Orth is smirking.
