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by Frans Bouma.
Original Post: XBOX's 4th of july
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Some German geeks discovered a hole in the XBOX's dashboard loader code and because Microsoft didn't respond to their claims, they now have released their proof of concept to the public, with exploit code. I find it a little farfetched to call it a 'security hole' which should be stamped 'critical', because after all it just lets you do what you want with hardware you own yourself. The exploit is a nifty trick with an integer underflow in the buffer allocation logic in the font loader. Two doctored font files, called ernie.xft and bert.xft do the work for you. Sorry to say it but I find it clever that you can find such a hole in the first place and a sign of a good sense of humour to call the files to pull the trick 'ernie' and 'bert' :)
As always with this kind of things: piracy is wrong, bad, hurts people in their income and does other nasties. Nevertheless, the technology aspect of the whole matter is very interesting, but perhaps you have to be a geek for that ;)
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