Given that the Xbox 360 was damn near bulletproof (there have been very few attacks against it, even still), I expect that the next generation is going to be an even bigger step up, not a step backwards. If you can't compromise code running on the device, then you're not going to be able to inject new cert chains and be able to MITM connections or use private servers, as I strongly doubt that they'll mess up those handshakes.

This won't kill homebrew nor piracy, but it's going to put a massive dent in both. Nothing is unbreakable in theory, but when the cost of a break raises to a certain point, it's effectively unbreakable in practice; they're rapidly approaching that point, if they haven't hit it already.

All of this makes me pretty sad, really. I'm no supporter of piracy, and I don't generally use homebrew software, but I'm going to miss the challenge of breaking consoles. I remember sitting in my apartment in San Diego back in early 2006, with bunnie and a couple other guys, modifying shaders on the King Kong demo from the kiosk disc in an attempt to read out memory from the 360 and display it. I didn't have much interaction with the 360 scene after that stuff, but sitting around and coming up with angles of attack with the best and brightest in the console community was just amazingly fun.

What do you mean by bulletproof? 99% of all Xbox 360's here in Uruguay are hacked - maybe what you mean is that all of them were through the same exploit/attack?.

I can see that they must have raised security A LOT, but it seems it hasn't stopped the pirates.

> 99% of all Xbox 360's here in Uruguay are hacked

as in they flashed the disc reader's firmware to have it say 'yes, this is a legit disc', which does not invalidate the fact that the code on the disc is signed.

> What do you mean by bulletproof?

bulletproof as in even partial access to the hardware to execute random, sideloaded, unsigned code on the CPU is extremely involved, if at all possible.

Thanks for the clarification :) .

From a practical purpose, it doesn't sound bulletproof, but for the homebrew community it sure does.

"Under Microsoft's current guidelines, which may still be changed, the decision of whether a game will require an internet connection to work and if that is a one-time authentication or a constant connection, will be left up to individual publishers."

source: http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/26/4268782/next-xbox-drm-achie...

That rumour has been debunked several times by journalists. To be fair, their debunking is also a rumour, but it's still good to keep that in mind.