What makes you think this case is any different? Microsoft can't keep Office or Windows under wraps, nor the XBOX, nor anything else.
The hackers will win, as always.
You're falling into a narrative trap. It's not actually "hackers vs. Microsoft". Microsoft pays some of the best in the world. Most examples of hackers beating companies involve companies that did not invest seriously in countermeasures. That's not a problem Microsoft has.
What just about all consumer electronics companies have failed to do is lock down their hardware from being hacked in the first place - after all, Sony and Apple also pay some of the best in the world, and the PS3 and iPhone have been cracked wide open with software.
Microsoft is certainly better than most (the 360 doesn't yet have a software patch - there are hardware solutions - that can be used for piracy), but they are by no means immune to hackers.
Once the Kinect is in my house, who cares what I do with it? I can smash it with a hammer, I can send it USB commands. My Kinect, my house, my rules.
DirectTV is the same. Once the radio waves are in my house, why can't I decrypt them to watch TV for free? If DirectTV wants me to pay for TV, why are they sending the signal into my house!?
Otherwise, this argument is a bit more nuanced than either of you are acknowledging.
The difference between cell phones and DirectTV is that you have session keys for your phone calls, but there is one global key for every user in the country for DirectTV. Such is the nature of broadcasting.
They chose a "cheap" method to distribute TV to users, but it's also very "insecure". The cell-phone companies, on the other hand, developed a very expensive infrastructure, and it's more secure as a result.
The utility of Kinect is a physical piece of equipment. There's no service (although it may be used with a service), therefore there's no requirement to receive updates once hacked. Microsoft only gets one chance to deploy their defences: when the Kinect is in the factory.
(Microsoft could use the exact same scheme by bricking their devices with fuses when they fail some routine checkup; they could also brick every device and then issue a recall/reissue. They have better options than that, though).
What does it cost now?
(b) Limor isn't putting a bounty on pirating a game. She's putting a bounty on forced interoperability with a hostile proprietary peripheral. The bounty is great (even though I think "her team" will lose). I think it's kind of insulting to compare it to pirating games, which is indefensible.
They did something with consumer hardware that made tampering with it economically infeasible.
The exact same technique they use is available to Microsoft, should they be willing to pay to integrate and (more painfully) license it.
What Pay TV providers did to stop Pay TV hackers is an open secret, but I don't work in Pay TV and don't know exactly how "open" the secret is, which is why I'm dancing around this argument rather than just killing it with facts.
Some of the best. And most of the best are "out there" and not on their payroll. Plus it's not impossible that some of these supposed best on their payroll may also contribute, on the side, to helping hack/crack their products, anonymously. Regardless though, I bet for every 1 world-class hacker inside Microsoft there are 100+ outside of it, and some of the latter will have the interest and time and skills to hack it.
These arguments make sense if you believe that "DRM" (software protection) has lost the technological war. But it hasn't! You just don't see the high-end stuff deployed in places where hackers care about it --- with the possible exception of the hypervisor-secured game consoles.
1. No doubt there are incredibly intelligent, motivated people working for Microsoft, but talent requires an appropriate environment to reach its potential. 2. The mistake is often made of assuming that the "good guys" are the only ones with smart people on their side. This mistake is most frequently seen in discussions of national security and nuclear technology. 3. All it takes to defeat a non-service-based DRM scheme is one vulnerability. If the Kinect has to continually stream motion data to Microsoft servers for processing (kind of like Android speech recognition), then Microsoft can keep changing the protocol and encryption. If Microsoft's 100 talented engineers leave just one gap, and one talented hacker finds it, then hackers "win." 4. "Might makes right" should absolutely apply to what talented hackers do with products they own. I value individual property rights above corporate business model preservation. It is the duty of the giant and powerful corporations to ensure their business models aren't vulnerable to the whims of talented hackers, and using the law to make it so is unethical.
Where is it, then? And if it's where I think it is, don't most such places keep tight control of their hardware? (As opposed to letting random consumers buy and own it.)
BD+ in particular, I thought some commercial program was already able to emulate. And I haven't heard of any movies where there are no pirated versions available, but I don't watch them at all, so I might be out of the loop.
And mere Blu-Ray (for those disks without BD+), is pretty well cracked at this point if one is to believe the hexadecimal numbers going around the internet.
They have access to talent of that caliber, but apparently ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems ) they aren't willing to pay for it.