Slashdot is reporting that The Neo Project, a distributed computing effort, has ceased trying to factor Microsoft's Xbox binary signing key, due to "legal reasons," and the fact that many of their current participants don't want to be soiled by association with something having a nefarious reputation.
The Xbox public RSA key is 2048 bits in length, and its digits may be found at http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/articles.php?aid=200235404321 Michael Robertson, the Lindows CEO, is funding two $100k prizes for Linux on the Xbox. The first was to run Linux on a modded Xbox, and the second is to devise some method of running Linux on an unmodded Xbox, for which factoring the aforementioned RSA key is one satisfactory approach amongst several. The Microsoft Xbox is internally an Windows 2000 box, with a 733 mhz 0.18 micron Coppermine Mobile Celeron, 64 MB of DDR RAM on two high speed channels, a 10 GB disk, custom nVidia GPU, Ethernet, 4 USB ports, a 5x DVD-ROM drive, and a Dolby capable audio processor, all at a lovely price point of $199. It is said that Microsoft loses money on every one sold, and the box would certainly make a lovely Linux box or Web Server providing you could run something other than Microsoft-signed binaries on it. You can of course run anything on your Xbox if you modchip it, but this requires taking it apart, voiding the warranty, getting permanently blacklisted for Microsoft's online gaming services, and other bad things. Also, only a tiny fraction of Xbox owners are going to bother modchipping their systems, and for the Xbox to become a popular general purpose computer, the ability to just burn any software you want on a DVD and cram it in the slot on an unmodified Xbox is required. Ignoring for the moment that The Neo Project had zero chance of factoring a 2048 bit key using publicly available algorithms, their caving under imagined legal pressure strikes me as a really bad precedent. Microsoft, an illegal monopoly in the area of computer operating systems, is attempting to garner a share of the gaming market. To this end, they are selling at below their cost, a robust well-built low-end PC at an extremely attractive price. In order to prevent this box from perturbing their core monopoly business of selling operating systems to manufacturers of similar computers, they are shipping the box as a sealed unit, not designed to be opened by the consumer, and they have rigged the OS to only execute binaries signed by them. Now, it strikes me that Microsoft has absolutely no legal right to prevent me from running any program I choose on hardware that I OWN, and doing any reverse engineering necessary to achieve this goal. This isn't like reverse engineering software, which I don't really own, but merely have a license to use under certain conditions. It isn't like breaking copy protection on a copyrighted work either. It's like buying a trunk at a rummage sale, and having a set of keys made so you can open it without damaging it, to see what's inside, and to use it in the future for purposes a trunk is suited for. Before this silly notion that writing programs and running them on an Xbox which one owns is somehow illegal gathers steam, I think it would be real useful if an organization like the EFF could issue an opinion, written by a real lawyer, stating that people have every right to run their own code on their own Xbox. And furthermore, that reverse engineering neccessary to achieve this goal, like factoring the public RSA key for the Xbox, is a perfectly legitimate activity, and has nothing to do with some other things having a bad reputation, like cracking copyright protection, or making illegal copies of licensed commercial software. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
