Taking a break from working on his doctoral thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate student Andrew "Bunnie" Huang decided that it might be fun to poke around the security systems protecting Microsoft's Xbox game console. With a little creative tinkering and a measure of precision soldering, Huang quickly isolated the main public security keys. Although legally prevented from sharing the keys with the world, he described his methods in detail 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.
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