Microsoft Says Kinect Left Open By Design 215
kai_hiwatari writes "Around two week ago when Adafruit announced a bounty for developing an open-source driver for the Kinect, Microsoft made it clear that they didn't condone it. Now Microsoft seems to have realized the potential of their device and has made a U-turn. Alex Kipman, Xbox Director of Incubation, now says that they left the Kinect open by design. Kipman said, '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 Usual Microsoft Flip-Flop (Score:3, Informative)
Before open driver:
"Developing open drivers for the Kinect hardware will be considered here at MS as tampering with trade secrets, and will be prosecuted as such."
After:
"Oh no no no no no we totally designed it that way in order to foster, um, innovation?...yeah good job to those guys."
Their side of story (Score:5, Informative)
The first thing to talk about is, Kinect was not actually hacked. Hacking would mean that someone got to our algorithms that sit inside 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 what we have put a ton of work and effort to make sure doesn’t actually occur.
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.
MS has mixed up 'Hacking' and 'Cracking' (Score:5, Informative)
No, that's cracking. Hacking seems to be exactly what has taken place... The device has been used as defined by the user, not the original software, for purposes outside of the original scope of the device as intended by the producer of the device.
Re:The hardware is useless (Score:2, Informative)
It can produce a depth image. It's not thee-eyed (whatever that should be), but on the other hand, I'm not sure what you bought for $200 - either something else, or somebody really ripped you off.
Re:Everyone has a right to change their mind (Score:5, Informative)
However, if they didn't want to come off as asshats I think they should have said, "originally we had said that the Kinect should remain closed.
No, thats not what they originally said.
What they said is two very short quotes. Here, let me help you:
"Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products. With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant."
Thats what they said, exactly.
Re:Oh yeah (Score:3, Informative)
Doesn't appear to be a DMCA violation (Score:5, Informative)
Can you spell DMCA?
Breaking encryption that was put there for a purpose other than to control access to an original work of authorship does not violate the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Chamberlain v. Skylink; Lexmark v. Static Control Components.
Re:The hardware is useless (Score:4, Informative)
The Kinect does not do stereo image capture. Thats what those 3D movie people are doing (when they bother with that.)
The Kinect has two image sensors, thats for sure, but they dont even capture the same wavelengths of light.
The IR sensor captures only infrared.
There is some processing going on in the Kinect, but only to measure the spacing (and perhaps size) of the IR dots that are being projected by the device in order to produce a depth-map. This processing is clearly mostly trivial.
The magic of the Kinect as used by Microsoft is whats going on inside the xbox where they take the optical image, and with assistance from the depth map, detect people and construct a simplified 3d model (usable for input triggers) of how their body is oriented.
It is this second part that is clearly not-trivial. People come in all shapes and sizes, wear different clothing (if any..), and so forth and so on. Simply flagging the pixels that belong to people vs pixels that dont isnt easy, which is why the depth map is used for assistance.
Re:Doesn't appear to be a DMCA violation (Score:3, Informative)
Cheers for those references.
The arguments presented in the Chamberlain v. Skylink case are interesting:
According to undisputed facts, a homeowner who purchases a Chamberlain GDO owns it and has a right to use it to access his or her own garage. At the time of sale, Chamberlain does not place any explicit terms or condition on use to limit the ways that a purchaser may use its products. A homeowner who wishes to use a Model 39 must first program it into the GDO. Skylink characterizes this action as the homeowner's authorization of the Model 39 to interoperate with the GDO. In other words, according to Skylink, Chamberlain GDO consumers who purchase a Skylink transmitter have Chamberlain's implicit permission to purchase and to use any brand of transmitter that will open their GDO. The District Court agreed that Chamberlain's unconditioned sale implied authorization. Id.
The authorisation argument seemed important to that case, and potentially to other cases where the manufacturer of a product attempts to use copyright law to control (fair) use of the device.
Also relevant to this discussion:
In a similar vein, Chamberlain's proposed construction would allow any manufacturer of any product to add a single copyrighted sentence or software fragment to its product, wrap the copyrighted material in a trivial "encryption" scheme, and thereby gain the right to restrict consumers' rights to use its products in conjunction with competing products.[16] In other words, Chamberlain's construction of the DMCA would allow virtually any company to attempt to leverage its sales into after-market monopolies—a practice that both the antitrust laws, see Eastman Kodak Co. v. Image Tech. Servs., 504 U.S. 451, 455, 112 S.Ct. 2072, 119 L.Ed.2d 265 (1992), and the doctrine of copyright misuse, Assessment Techs. of WI, LLC v. WIREdata, Inc., 350 F.3d 640, 647 (7th Cir.2003), normally prohibit.
Re:The hardware is useless (Score:4, Informative)
No it isn't, and that's not how the algorithm works. As the camera is placed very near to the IR projector, the dot spacing is essentially constant. The dots may be farther apart in physical space for farther objects, but the camera can't see that.
As far as we can tell/guess, the way it actually works is by measuring horizontal displacement of the dots caused by objects at different depths, due to the horizontal distance between the projector and the camera. This is a lot harder, requires subpixel processing to achieve any kind of depth resolution, and requires a carefully controlled dot projection and calibration to that specific pattern. Not to mention this is likely the reason why the laser projector is temperature-stabilized with a peltier (to keep the pattern as generated by the diffraction grating stable) and why the Kinect's internal chassis is quite solid (the distance between the camera and projector and their angle is critical).
In fact, you can point two Kinects at the same subject and overlap their IR patterns, and they still work quite well and do not interfere (!) except at a small percentage of points where the clouds line up in the wrong way (you get two almost complete images, with a bunch of small holes where the patterns happen to line up).
Re:Oh yeah (Score:4, Informative)
WTF? He's talking about USB. As in physical interconnection between the phone and the PC. If someone has tapped into a USB link, they already have the physical access necessary to get at your data regardless.
By your absurd logic, the USB mass-storage protocols should be encrypted because you might transfer personal information to/from a USB disk.
Re:The hardware is useless (Score:3, Informative)
Absolutely. You can get a PrimeSense or Kinect camera if you are a serious game developer. You can also just purchase a Panasonic D-Imager depth camera for a few grand. Probably there will be a dozen of these cameras at consumer price points within a year or two. Having the data from the cameras, as pointed out, is somewhat limited.
Creating algorithms that will analyze movement takes about 4 years, and you can get this software from Softkinetic and from Omek (I work for Omek). Microsoft has obviously developed its own software, but it probably won't share it with you. Omek also has a gesture recording capability, which means that instead of programming new moves, you can actually stand in front of the camera and record new moves. You need to use a number of different people to get it right, but it does reduce development time dramatically. So anyone serious about this doesn't have to re-create this --it's out there and you can license it. Eventually there may be open source solutions, but it will take a while.