Microsoft Won't Punish Kinect Modders / "Hackers"

[caption id="attachment_11630" align="aligncenter" width="620" caption="Rose is safe. For now."][/caption]

Earlier this week Microsoft had issued one of it's hard-line decree's when it came to light that some people were doing "unholy" things with their Kinects, like taking them apart and modding them to work with Windows operating systems.  In response MS stated that they would "work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant."

Well seems they have now softened their usual hard stance on this sort of thing. In talking to NPR,  Microsoft's Alex Kipman and Microsoft Games Studios' Shannon Loftis stepped it back a bit and also clarified what they consider "hacking" the unit.

Mr. KIPMAN: The first thing to talk about is Kinect was not actually hacked. Hacking would mean that someone got to our algorithms that sit on the side of the Xbox and was able to actually use them, which hasn't happened. Or it means that you put a device between the sensor and the Xbox for means of cheating, which also has not happened. That's what we call hacking, and that's why we have put a ton of work and effort to make sure it doesn't actually occur.

FLATOW: So what would you - okay.

Mr. KIPMAN: What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor. The sensor again, as I talked earlier, has eyes and ears and that's a whole bunch of, you know, noise that someone needs to take and turn into signal. People...

FLATOW: So you left it open by design then? So you knew people could get into it.

Mr. KIPMAN: Yeah. Correct.

Prof. ISBISTER: And I just want to throw in that this is the kind of thing that's a dream for researchers like myself. I mean, I still haven't got an actually developer's kit for the Wii, but we use the open-source shareable inputs to the Wii-motes. And that's how we work with the Wii technology, and -so I was very heartened to see that the Kinect's actual hardware was going to be available soon for researchers anyway to put stuff together and test in the lab.

FLATOW: So you have no problem...

Prof. ISBISTER: As an...

FLATOW: ...with Microsoft, with the people using the open-source drivers then?

Ms. LOFTIS: As an experienced creator, I'm very excited to see that people are so inspired that it was less than a week after the Kinect came out before they had started creating and thinking about what they could do.

FLATOW: So no one is going to get in trouble?

Mr. KIPMAN: Nope. Absolutely not.

Ms. LOFTIS: No.

FLATOW: You heard it right from the mouth of Microsoft.
Well that's kind of neat if I do say so myself. Although they didn't mention anything about the warranty, which I'm sure is as good as gone the moment the first screw comes out of the unit.  So all you engineers out there...I want my Kinect sex game pronto.

How The X-Box Kinect Tracks Your Moves (NPR)