Xbox encryption hack is a quixotic mission

THE PLAN TO DECRYPT Microsoft's Xbox is almost certainly jousting at windmills. Why does reality have to intrude on fun so often?...

Don't encourage them!
" The goal of Operation Project X is to crack the RSA-2048 bit public key."

Have a quick look at the RSA factoring challenge site:
http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/challenges/factoring/numbers.html

I think this might give you an idea of how pointless a task it is trying to crack the XBox RSA key!

Regards,
Dave

Unless I am mishtaken, this project will be 2^192 times harder than RC5's 64bit contest. That project took 1757 days. Without factoring moore's law, with the same ammount of CPU power as the RC5 project, Project-X should take 11,028,867,749,074,400,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000 days.

You know what that means? I'll need to install the client on 2^192 computers!!! AMD, do you take direct deposit? I would like to buy 6,277,101,735,386,680,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000 Hammer processors.

Email address supplied

Microsoft is using 2048-bit encryption on their X-Box. That means there are over 3.2x10^618 possibilities...

Here it is in non-scientific form

3200000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000

I doubt they will ever even get close to getting it right.

as /. put it.... 2^2048 is about 3.23 x 10^616
They've tried about 17 billion keys, which is approximately none of that.
There are, as a higher estimate, 10^81 atoms in the universe.
If they tried 10 trillion keys a day, it would take them only 8.85 x 10^597 years.
There becomes a point where hope should be considered idiocricy.
--------------
Microsoft is dying trolls are so 2001.

The saga of miniaturising Windows continues to draw a crowd...

I read with interest your stories regarding win9x and NT4 in under 30-40 MB.

My company, Brooks Innovations invented 98lite in 1999 and we do custom installs of win9x in 10 MB with fully networked versions around 15 MB. We routinely offer our clients installs that fit on 32MB flash disks - often with many megabytes of free space with full read write and registry access without using ram drives and without compression.

Our public access program 98lite routinely installs to 70MB with customisation
getting a user in the 40 MB range.

http:\www.litepc.com
http:\www.embeddingwindows.com

Shane Brooks
Director,
Brooks Innovations

The letters page yesterday had an answer for a previous letters page and... Oh, you get the idea...

I think that someone should explain to this reader of yours what DMA transferring mode really means and how it works, since he believes that the CPU is doing the job there, obviously confusing it with PIO (Programmed Input/Output) modes and such.

Luca Pierantozzi

The possibility that Pentium 4s might be hackable has opened up some fierce debate...

Hi there,

Reactivate HT on non-HT P4 is stricly impossible. Like for the multiplicator, the HT functions are disabled by micro-fuse, not by any kind of software (including the
microcode).

[One of yesterday's letters about the Gigabyte 8IHXPr2 trick was] 100% False. Even if HT was really re-enabled, it's like when you install a P4 3.06 HT instead of an non-HT CPU : On Windows 2000, the first boot detect an "ACPI Multiprocessor" instead of the classical "ACPI Uniprocessor" and ask for a reboot. The second logical CPU is activated at the SECOND reboot, when the SMP driver is loaded.

All this are rumors. You can mislead without any problem the Operating System with false APIC initialization, but you'll never have the perf. boost of a P4 HT. When you flash to a new BIOS, the CMOS is cleared. Perhaps the BIOS doesn't "understand" what was coded in CMOS and it initialize a "ghost" second logical CPU in the APIC. But nothing more...

Email address supplied

I've been sort-of following this on some of the popular web forums, and while HT been showing up on some P4's randomly (there being actually 0% performance gain), that you can't actually turn on HT and use it unless you have a multiprocessor kernal in your OS. ie, running your basic version of XP h or p, or 2k, it should be impossible to use HT (and get a preformance gain), or multiple processors (and have your second processor even show up). Don't get me wrong, from what people have been saying on different forums, you can see that you have HT enabled, through various programs, but unless you have a multiprocessor kernal you won't be able to make use of it. That
being said, thus far, no one i've chatted with, or just read articles of, has been able to reproduce the results (of having HT enabled). No one thus far has shown a performance gain from having HT enabled on their P4<3.06w/HT.

Conclusions on 0% perf. gain? They a. don't have a multiprocessor kernal. b. it's simply a flaw in the way some programs recognize the P4, c. none of the above?.

One side note, it's only certain P4's (ES*) that are capable of showing HT
thus far.

a couple of forums i've been to and gotten alot of the information from above, also c ref. microsoft's website for varification on the m/kernals as well as intel's site:
VRforums.com
Hardforums.com

Dave

Litigation as negative advertising is rather nasty...

Nice piece, especially about creative marketing, spot on. The whole thing
disgusts me on many levels but is indicative of how much carpet-bagging goes
on.

Off at a tangent...

After reading all the stories on the AMD Opteron on your website, I started to look for additional information on Opteron boards on CEBIT.

Dressed in a suit, a went to see the mainboard manufactures, and I did ask information about there Opteron boards.

Most manufactures did have a Opteron desktop mainboard in there booth. These boards did have a VIA or NVIDIA chipset. But I haven't seen a single serverboard. So I started to ask about there serverboards.

- AMD: Yes, we will launch the CPU in April, all mainboard manufactures have
the boards ready, they are waiting for the CPU.
- ASUS: we are developing a single processor board, the dual will come later
- ABIT: we have a desktop board, we are thinking about a serverboard. But we
don't know if we will release it. It's not clear if there is a sufficient demand for these boards.
- MSI: We have a serverboard, but we don't show it. One sales representative did speak my native language (Dutch), so we did have a chat. He told me AMD does have problems concerning the certification of the Opteron boards. It looks like the opteron serverboards are not ready for prime-time. (my personal opinion!) He gave me a brochure containing there serverboards. There Opteron board was printed in this brochure. It support DDR200, DDR266 and DDR333. But it doesn't support DDR400. All the desktop boards shown, did have support for DDR400.

- AOpen: We won't sell Opteron server boards in the next months.

So, AMD wants to sell it's Opteron as a server CPU, but it looks like there isn't much support for it at the mainboard manufactures. Or does AMD wants to give the large OEMs some exclusive rights on the use of Opterons in there servers? I my opinion, most Opteron machines will be desktop computers.

Most desktop boards shown, did only have 2 DIMM slots, so these machines won't have a huge amount of memory. (it's hard to find modules larger than 1GB)

I hope this information can help to cool down the hot air spread by AMD on the Opteron. But I'm still waiting for Opteron serverboards to build some cool servers :-)

Sorry for my bad English. Please remove my E-mail in case you would use some information from this E-mail.

Name and email address supplied

Will Smartphones outsell PDAs next year?...

Hello Mike, enjoyed your article.

Everyone seems to be pouting about Microsoft's little phone projects and wondering why MS is throwing away the money - but there are some dots that nobody seems to be connecting here.

Microsoft can only do well when they can leverage their monopoly position in one market to eliminate competition in another - up until now there wasn't a tool to do that in the phone market. But there is one - and it can't loose.

Office 2003 (secure Outlook too?) - what if on your future phone, the only way to open/edit/reply to a "secure" Office 2003 document is to do it on a "Windows" platform phone? Outlook may do this as well - I just don't know that...so there's your
general e-mail too.

This assumes the coporate world will uptake the new version of Office - but the lure of psuedo-secure documents can't loose in that market. I see them running to it, it'll sound too good to the Big Wig Mucky Mucks who hold the pursestrings. Then you have all those high powered high payed employees who's work is life, need to work on the go and will need a MS based phone to do it - cause they'll be using MS "secure" documents and e-mail.

Total win for MS - they can stomp out everyone else for that market - and throw the DCMA at anyone who even thinks/talks of trying to open those things up (over here in the land of Freedom and preemption). Or MS can choose to license that technology for a nice premium...if they want to appear nice...

Think about it, write about it - someone needs to connect those dots....This could really whack the high end market for phones of high end workers....

Cheers,
Scott

More general comments...

I've become a rabid Iraq-US news monger(on the conservative side) My God you have done an outstanding job of ignoring the situation. This is exactly what is needed here(theinq.) being in the Bay Area of Cal. Life is very difficult McCarthyism (For my thinking) is everywhere, I like that you have not succumbed to one doctrine or another. This (major problem) will pass technology for human kind, and TheInq.com will continue to publish. Thank You from Silicon Valley,

Oliver

It's not news to some people that Pentium M might be just a tweaked Pentium III. But it is a source of phlegm in one case...

Well there's a shock. This probably is true for the desktop too.

A PIII clocked at 2GHz will probably comprehensive trounce a P4 clocked at the same, which is AMDs CISC vs RISC argument with the Athlon XP.

However, this kind of undermines the strategy that Intel has relied upon with its sales of the P4; that Megahurtz matters to the public, much as pub talk horsepower matters to the back-to-front baseball hat brigade down the local (it's not the car that matters so much, it's the driver).

To be honest, my P4 notebook running at 1.9GHz isn't 4 times as fast as the PIII based 500Mhz Dell I've got in the cupboard. More like twice. And I get almost 2 hours of DVD playback with it.

Rgds,
Stan

For further entertainment, try asking your Intel sources why Intel aren't planning to release a desktop version of Pentium M. On the face of it, it would seem an attractive processor for small, quiet desktop PCs that don't need leading-edge performance.

Email address supplied

Your ass is in a twist because the Pentium M is a runaway success. So, you have to spill your bull shit about how Intel didn;t really do anything at all - that the Banias is a P3 knock off.

Get over it.

Your lover AMD is all fucked up and Intel is speeding ahead.

[To which Mike replied with one word, "Rubbish." And then got this in return]

Nope - it's the truth.

You keep spewing your bile, trying to denigrate any and all Intel successes - while blowing up every rumor and phony fairy tale about AMD.

Your problem, Mike, is that you have lost touch with reality.

Reality is what it is - not what you think it should be.

Name and email address supplied

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