How Hackers Accidentally Sold a Pre-Release XBox One To the FBI 67
SpacemanukBEJY.53u (3309653) writes Earlier this week, an indictment was unsealed outlining a long list of charges against a group of men that stole intellectual property from gaming companies such as Epic Games, Valve, Activision and Microsoft. An Australian member of the group, Dylan Wheeler, describes how it was betrayed by an informant working for the FBI, which bought a hardware mockup of an Xbox One that the group built using source code stolen from Microsoft's Game Developer Network Portal. The device, which the FBI paid $5,000 for, was supposed to be sent to the Seychelles, but never arrived, which indicated the hacking collective had a mole.
If the hacking group were Apple (Score:1)
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IP theft is the new murder.
Yay! (Score:4, Funny)
Must mean they've already caught all the murderers, rapists, serial killers, and other dangerous criminals, now they have to turn to this.
Re:Yay! (Score:4, Insightful)
The cost of the human life is quite small compared to the value of the IP being disclosed here. Sad but true...
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The Value of Life [wikipedia.org]
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We can save lives by putting up massive crush barriers between the streets and the sidewalks and putting pedestrian tunnels or overpasses at each and every intersection in the US. The cost would be enormous. In the end it would be a really bad choice because IT (the cost) would not be WORTH IT (the lives saved).
Of course as people we do not say that 100 lives are just not worth a 400 billion dollar expenditure. But we, even as individuals do inhe
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We even do it to ourselves when we buy life insurance.
Re:Yay! (Score:4, Interesting)
And here I learn that laws can only be enforced when all more severe crimes have been fully handled.
"Sorry, we can't pursue this murder of your child, Mr. Smith, the genocide in Darfur isn't resolved yet."
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Really? So, say the slaughter on an industrial scale of the Nazies, or Stalin, or Mao is somehow similar to the single murder? Even Stalin was bright enough to observe that quantity has a quality all its own.
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And here I learn that laws can only be enforced when all more severe crimes have been fully handled.
"Sorry, we can't pursue this murder of your child, Mr. Smith, the genocide in Darfur isn't resolved yet."
Why would the FBI be handling the genocide in Dafur, the FBI is a domestic law enforcement agency. Things like genocide and other war crimes are handled by the International Court of Justice at the Hague (more informally called the "world court")
There are different levels of law enforcement so that small crimes aren't lost in the big crimes. However the FBI shouldn't be concentrating on things like industrial espionage and copyright infringement as these are pretty victimless crimes and in the case of co
Re:Yay! (Score:5, Insightful)
So someone could steal your car, steal your identity, destroy your business with a targeted hack, and you'd be fine with the police not investigating because there are still murderers and rapists out there? Alrighty then. Crime is crime and it all deserves to be investigated. Some crimes are worse but it's not like they put them in order, start with the murderers and completely ignore the rest.
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Back in the '90s the NYPD discovered that if you enforce laws against minor offenses like jaywalking, littering, etc. then there will be less serious crime in that same area.
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FBI doesn't do murders, rapists, serial killers, etc. Those are the business of State & local law enforcement.
The FBI mostly does counterfeiting and kidnapping (and they only do kidnapping because the Lindbergh Baby was a potential source of good publicity for J. Edgar Hoover).
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The FBI mostly does counterfeiting and kidnapping (and they only do kidnapping because the Lindbergh Baby was a potential source of good publicity for J. Edgar Hoover).
The Lindbergh kidnapping is the kidnapping-for-ransom that everyone remembers from that era.
There were others.
The fear then and now was such kidnappings would become a commonplace - organized - crime, as it has become in other countries.
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Must mean they've already caught all the murderers, rapists, serial killers, and other dangerous criminals, now they have to turn to this.
Law enforcement multi-tasks.
The Slashdot geek tends to believe that his elite technical skills have earned him a lifetime "Get Out Of Jail Free" card --- and will go miles out of his way to let you know it.
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If they were off doing some SWAT operation to bang in some guy's door for uploading some movies to the internet instead, yes I have every right to be upset.
Police are a limited resource, a resource that should be used against dangerous and lethal crime. So if the police couldn't make it to my house for a robbery right away because they were tied up bringing down some crime kingpin, that I can perfectly accept. But if they're going to waste their time on some large corporation's IP, I'll be damned if I'm o
They didn't accidentally anything (Score:2, Insightful)
Retitle: How an FBI mole stole a pre-release xbox one from hackers.
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..or rather how fbi mole something loaded with xbox one devkit?
can it even play any games? is it functional in any way? someone was just stupid enough to shell out 5 k for it. if someone was stupid enough to buy something like that, the seller could be tempted just to throw windows 8.1 on it and call it xbox one, any differences would be user error..
Someone wanted an Xbox One at launch??? (Score:5, Funny)
They should have known it was a setup when someone offered to buy an Xbox One.
I kid, I kid. ;-)
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Or are you kidding?
O_o
Re:Someone wanted an Xbox One at launch??? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, lots of people wanted an Xbox One at launch. The XB1's sales curve has been really weird.
It had pretty great month-1 sales. It would have had the fastest month-1 sales of any console in history - if it hadn't launched alongside the PS4 (which broke the previous records by an even larger margin). But some time shortly after Christmas, the sales basically flatlined. First MS switched to talking about "units shipped" rather than "units sold" and then it stopped issuing new numbers at all.
By piecing together bits and pieces of retailer and regional sales data, it's possible to get a broad understanding of where the console stands now. Having originally been tipped to pass the Wii-U and take second-place in current gen sales somewhere around April, it appears that it probably only did so some time in September (and indeed, it certainly hasn't officially been announced yet, so there's at least an outside chance it's still in third). It's had several significant sales blips, driven first by the price cut when Kinnect was removed and then again by Destiny, but background sales outside of these blips have been generally very slow throughout 2014.
It's actually pretty similar to (though marginally better than) the sales profile for the Wii-U. That console actually sold well during its first 6 weeks or so on sale, before flatlining. Each first-party Nintendo game since then has caused a small 1-week spike in sales, but after Mario Kart, diminishing returns appear to be kicking in.
In regional terms, The Xbox One appears to be in a fairly solid second place in the US (behind the PS4), a distant second place in Europe (again behind the PS4) and third place in Japan. Indeed, the PS4 is also doing badly in Japan - home console gaming is dying in that market and even the Wii-U (which holds first place there) is doing badly compared to the last gen consoles.
The Xbox One does still have a few big irons in the fire and isn't quite in a Wii-U style Last Chance Saloon yet (if Smash Bros and Bayonetta 2 don't turn around the Wii-U's fortunes this Christmas, the console essentially can be considered dead). Forza Horizon 2 is a fairly big draw and Halo 5 will be a bigger one. But MS have certainly gone backwards since the days of the 360, when they dominated the US and managed a reasonable draw with Sony in Europe. In marketshare terms, the Xbox One looks a lot more like the original Xbox.
Though in general terms, this has been an extremely boring year for console games anyway. People get excited about new console releases, forgetting that they tend to be followed by 12 months during which there isn't much worth playing for them. It's always the later years of the cycle that are more fun in terms of game releases.
Your post is too long ... (Score:2)
... FBI moles make long posts.
Just sayin'.
How Hackers Got Money (Score:3)
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Title Is Misleading (Score:2)
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bought a hardware mockup of an Xbox One that the group built using source code stolen from Microsoft's Game Developer Network Portal
*twitch* You don't make a hardware mockup out of source code. An editor somewhere needs to be slapped.
Either it's a "hardware mockup" and it doesn't work because it doesn't have the software, or it's just a "mockup" and maybe it does work. Next, they'll be telling me it's Digital and has All The p's.
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I made no claim about what the software needs to run.
A) I read "mockup" as "nonfunctional version." If it works, I would've said something more along the lines of "they hacked up a X-compatible."
B) Saying "hardware X" tells me that it specifically *doesn't* have all the required software to act functionally similar. If it did, you'd just call it "an X."
From Wikipedia:
In manufacturing and design, a mockup, or mock-up, is a scale or full-size model of a design or device, used for teaching, demonstration, design evaluation, promotion, and other purposes. A mockup is a prototype if it provides at least part of the functionality of a system and enables testing of a design.[1] Mock-ups are used by designers mainly to acquire feedback from users.
Note that if it were functional, it would be called a prototype, not a mockup. It sounds like mockups are only really useful for wind tunnel t
Stolen by the FBI, not sold to them (Score:2, Informative)
From the way the article describes it, the FBI actually stole the group's home-made XBox-like computer. The group used stolen login credentials to get the XBox specs and built a rig to spec with parts bought from NewEgg. Apparently a group of XBox enthusiasts paid $5000 for it (they knew it was a home-made rig), but then the guy who was supposed to send it to them handed it to the FBI instead.
To summarize: Group builds a computer with same specs as XBox. Group agrees to sell it to another group, and is p
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Reading comprehension is hard. The group built the mockup and sold it for $5000. The person who picked it up from them claimed to be an XBox enthusiast, but actually worked for the FBI.
Did you read to the end? I saw this quote:
While he was traveling in Prague, "I actually woke up, and lo and behold there is five grand sitting in my bank account," Wheeler said. "It came through, and we went 'OK!' and we sent it."
Where he said "we" (his group) sent it. Then I read the very next bit:
Around August 9, 2012, someone identified in the indictment as "Person A" went to Leroux's residence in Maryland and picked up the device. Person A was instructed to send the device to an address in the Seychelles. But Wheeler said he heard through the group that the package never arrived.
Where he said that "Person A was instructed to send the device" and "he heard through the group [xbox enthusiasts who paid for it] that the package never arrived." So the story says that a group paid for it, he gave it to someone with instructions to send it to that group, then the group said it never arrived. The article continues with:
According to the indictment, Person A -- whose real name Wheeler said he knows -- gave the package to the FBI.
So the guy was supposed to send it to the purchasers (who
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They would have had to steal more than just specs. They'd need the operating system, or source code as mentioned in the article, to make it functional.
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"We at the FBI prefer the term intercepted. Thank you."
And the FBI didn't steal it. One of their group (or an intermediary) was given the box and then didn't send it to whomever they promised they would.
Nice to meet your mole! (Don't say "mole") (Score:3)
Moley-moley-moley-moley-moley!
Ah man, I've got to watch Austin Powers again. What a classic!
Obligatory (Score:2)
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the law is even clearer than that - there's no such thing as "intellectual property". there's copyright and patents and even trademarks (and all three are completely different things with completely different laws), but "IP" doesn't exist.
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IP is a briefer way of referring to those three things.
Why is the FBI doing this? (Score:2)
Stupid... (Score:2)
... Lets steal from microsoft and then talk about it on a communication protocol they completely control.
What.
Could.
Possibly.
Go.
Wrong?
Use ventrilo or team speak or mumble or something. Send in an email; go to this server, use this user name, join this channel.
Easy.
Can the FBI take over the server or pull logs from it? Maybe... depends on where it is... there are chat servers all over the world. Use one based in Brazil or something. It will slow them down. And try not to use the same server more then once. J
not enough child abusers to keep the Feds busy (Score:1)
Bullshit.
I could run off a collective list of people to investigate:
Every police officer
Every politician
Every individual with any ties to British Royalty
Every social worker
Every teacher
Every doctor
Every judge
Every other individual who has regular contact with OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN.
If you believe that (Score:1)
The device, which the FBI paid $5,000 for, was supposed to be sent to the Seychelles, but never arrived, which indicated the hacking collective had a mole.
Could someone please leak to the FBI that I'm selling illegal, pre-release bridges? Only $5 million each, plus shipping and handling. If anyone is interested you can contact me at obviousscam@didyoureallybelievethat.com