Hackers and programmers 'improving' the Xbox ...

An interesting article on how hackers and programmers are finding ways to 'improve' Microsoft's latest game-console, the Xbox:

From its cutting-edge graphics processor to the video game industry's first built-in hard drive, Microsoft's Xbox has been praised as one of the most technologically sophisticated game devices ever. But that's just not good enough for hardware and software experimenters who have been tinkering with the Xbox since the day it went on sale.

"It's a very powerful piece of hardware--that's what motivates us," said Dan Johnson, a high school senior from Sugarland, Texas, and creator of XboxHacker, a Web site dedicated to disseminating the latest information on Xbox tweaks. "It has the potential to do so much else. We can write lots of programs eventually to really exploit this thing."

Hackers have managed to use a faster ATA-100 cable to connect the console's hard disk and DVD drive. Beyond that, hardware hackers are still in research mode, working to crack password schemes and dissect the basic BIOS programming instructions built into the machine.

"I thought it would be easier than it is," Johnson said. "I think Microsoft put a lot more time into hacking and protection stuff than we anticipated."

"I think we're slowly making more and more progress. Just in the last couple of days, we've figured out some of the hard drive passwords--now we can access stuff on the Xbox hard drive with a PC."

Read the full and interesting article here.

Source: CNET News.Com