Have you ever considered what it would be like to use a Wii or a Kinect for something other than the video games designed for it? I have, I mean can you imagine what playing angry birds would be like using a Kinect?! Apparently a hacker did recently, and I am going to be completely honest when I say that I am jealous. I have always considered hacking to be interesting and occasionally I imagine what it would be like to rig led lights into my DS or rewire my Nintendo controller to hook up to the computer, but before I could, in either case, the thought of having some random people bust into my house and arrest me for copyright infringement scared me away from the idea. After digging around I have found so many unique and fun ideas that it's hard to not plan my spring break around hacking, but I still have to wonder: is hacking morally unjust?
On one hand I would be exploiting the companies intended uses, I would hate it if I created something that I worked on for months only to have someone break it in and change it to what they want; however, on the other hand I would love to see that people loved my product so much that they wanted to personalize it for themselves, but the nagging question would always be in the back of my mind: Why couldn’t I build something good enough for them to just accept?
Hacking a system can’t be that greatly frowned upon if people are paying thousands of dollars to see you manage it, like Adafruit. Adafruit currently has a bounty on the new Kinect system, one that would allow a hacker to cash in his finds for $3000. Originally they were offering $2000 for the open-source software (what enables the Kinect to sense motion) but Cnet released a story talking about another social-coding site, Github, that was offering $2000 as well for that same amount. If there is this much competition and money at stake it couldn’t be illegal, right? I think I’m still on the fence about this one, but if I could hack then I would definitely be playing World of Warcraft with it first.
Works Cited:
Announce, Adafruit. "The Open Kinect project – THE OK PRIZE – get $3,000 bounty for Kinect for Xbox 360 open source drivers" Adafruit, 4 Nov. 2010. Web 3 Mar. 2011
Suma, Evan, dir. World of Warcraft with Microsoft Kinect using FAAST and OpenNI. Melih Bilgil, 25 Dec. 2010. YouTube. Web. 3 Mar. 2011.
Announce, Adafruit. "The Open Kinect project – THE OK PRIZE – get $3,000 bounty for Kinect for Xbox 360 open source drivers" Adafruit, 4 Nov. 2010. Web 3 Mar. 2011
Terdiman,Daniel. “Bounty Offered for Open-source Kinect Driver" Cnet.
Cnet News, 4 Nov. 2010. Web. 3 Mar. 2011.
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