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A comment on Microsoft furious at $2,000 bounty for open source Kinect drivers. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft furious at $2,000 bounty for open source Kinect... by tptacek on Friday November 05, 2010 @07:03PM (#1875286)
If I understand this comment correctly, that's pretty much not at all the way DirecTV works. The people who "broke" DirecTV in the '90s didn't do it by hacking into DirecTV's servers.
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Re:Microsoft furious at $2,000 bounty for open source Kinect... by CamperBob on Friday November 05, 2010 @07:18PM (#1875338)
It just means that the usual arms race between defenders and attackers isn't as clear-cut as it is when both the peripheral and the host are sitting in your living room or lab.
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Re:Microsoft furious at $2,000 bounty for open source Kinect... by tptacek on Friday November 05, 2010 @07:54PM (#1875426)
No, I'm serious: the arms race we're talking about in DirecTV's case happened entirely in the living room.

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.

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