I have copyed Xbox games!

[WOWZY]

Hi there. Newbie here.

I've been lurking here from time to time and found alot of your posts very helpful.

Maybe I can shed a little light on the "Hacking" of the Xbox games a little. Microsoft has gone to great pains to make it the most difficult to pirate their games.

1) Xbox games are written differently than other CD/DVD discs. Normal CD/DVD's are written from the inner ring to the outer edge. Xbox games are written from the outside edge to the inner edge like an old record album. People are working right now to try to backwards copy Xbox games as we speak with not so good results. The one advantage of Xbox games being written backwards is that the games load faster because the data is moving faster on the outer edge than the inner edge.

2) Xbox games are written on DVD-9 discs. Even if you were able to copy Xbox games, the price of a DVD-9 disc is between $40-$50. So that would mean that it would be easier just to go out and buy the game.

The hackers are doing it mostly for bragging rights, but until the price of DVD-9's come down drastically it's not worth losing any sleep over.

I'm optomistic that it will be done though.

[Professor S]

Yes, lets all cheer for hackers who illegally copy games so that it will kill a console and make developers junp ship because they aren't making any money off of the pirated discs.

HUZAAH. ACCOLADES FOR THEM.

I now own a Dreamcast which is a WONDERFUL console, but is now DEAD and part of the reason was that hackers pirated their games

But lets get this RIGHT. The pond scum that do this are not "hackers". Hacker is a term of honor for individuals who believe in the rights of free information and hack into government and corporate computer systems for the purposes of knowledge, do NO damage, and then leave without disturbing anything, except maybe to leave a message on the company's site as to where they are vulnerable and how top fix it.

Piraters are "CRACKERS", who are usually 12 year old kids who think its cool to put "denial of service" attacks on friggin' forums. They have no ideals and no principles to why they do it beside wanting to brag to their little friends, when they aren't getting beat up at school, about how they don't have to pay the hard working people who made their games to play them.

I highly recommend the book "@Large" to anyone who is interested in hacking. Its about the single most scary incident of hacking that took place in the early 90's and lead to all the new information laws.

Basically, its a true story about this little demented kid who hacked into NASA and Sun Microsystems, trojaned their Operating system Solaris, sent it back and then had access to just about everything in the world, including US and Russian Military Satellite Codes. Its an EXCELLENT read and illustrates perfectly between "hackers" and crackers, for which the bet part of them dripped down the crack of their mom's a$$.

[quiet mike]

By the way have you guys learned that the Q thing was an April fools as well? The site that started it itself said it was a April Fools, plus they just "burned" a mini-DVD in a paragraph and and "press printed" a disck in the other one. Now that was a dead giveaway.