A MIT grad student hacked the Xbox and described his methods in a widely distributed research paper, helping spur a wave of Xbox-hacking that has led to the development of Xbox versions of Linux and other homemade software.
The publishing deal on his recently competed book, “Hacking the Xbox” was killed because the publisher is scared that Microsoft will come after them with the DMCA. (The Department of Justice recently used the DMCA to shut down ISOnews.com, a Web site partly used to distribute Xbox-hacking tools, and to imprison the site’s owner.)
So he decided to self-publish the book, but the shopping-cart service he used also got scared off by the DMCA.
“The thing I have to emphasize is that the book itself is not criminal,” Huang said. “It’d be like saying that breaking and entering is illegal, so you can’t write a book on how locks work.”
