Xbox 360 Fanboy

Back in January, we reported on a possible Xbox 360 OS hack that came from a German hacker's congress. Today, we learn from a post on SecurityFocus that indeed it was real, because there is proof that those hackers found a way to break Microsoft's iron clad code. As the story goes, back in November a vulnerability was found due to "Unsigned Code Execution in Hypervisor Mode" in the latest kernel update. In the end, this vulnerability could potentially allow full access to the Xbox 360's OS and hackers to wreak whatever hacking havoc they wished. But before you get too excited about running Windows Vista on your 360, the problem has since been fixed. Microsoft was notified back in January about the problem and they quickly released an auto-update six days later to prevent anyone from exploiting the bad code.

So ... any uber cool hacker up for teaching the rest of us some l33t hacking skills? We're thinking something along the lines of "Hacking Xbox 360s for Dummies".

[Via Xbox-Scene]

It looks like someone may have finally hacked the 360 to run Linux. Xbox-Scene is reporting that during the German 23C3 Hacker Congress an anonymous presenter came on stage during an "open mic" type session. With 360 in hand, he (or she) proceeds to load King Kong and fiddles around for a minute or two. Then, on the screen appears the Linux penguin and the old Mac logo with the words "Coming soon...". Could this finally be confirmation that the volatile King Kong shaders were exploited and are the key to hacking the 360's OS? Only time will tell, but someone should have warned that anonymous hacker that this little experiment voided his 360's warranty ... joke's on him!

[Thanks, BlueStar]

The talented Ben over at BenHeck.com has come up with a new take on your standard Xbox 360 controller. Ben must have had the logic that using two hands on your controller is so 2005, why not just condense the control scheme and make it so you only need one hand? This modded 360 controller allows just that, only one hand required! All kidding aside, the inspiration for this mod what so that people with disabilities or those who have function of just one hand could play the 360. This is actually a great mod and very well thought out, gold star for you Ben!

[Via Digg]
[Thanks, kade]