[SV_BubbleTime]

I always thought the best cat and mouse example was the Xbox 360 drive firmware angle tests.

The drive would report via some “secure” firmware if the disc passed detection or not. So the hackers made a firmware that reported good on a failure, ways to flash the drives over SATA, etc.

But either Microsoft was very clever or the hackers made a mistake… the drive would report the angle of the disc during certain movements. It would do some operation and report it went from 20degrees to 223 degrees. Well, the hackers and MS disagreed on an angle integer rollover.

The original drive would report 0-359degrees, but the hacked drive rolled over different and reported 0-360degrees or vice versa, I don’t remember. So iirc, MS listened for awhile, if a drive ever reported 360 degrees or whatever the wrong indication was, MS added it to a list.

One day, the drop the hammer banned the lot of them. It took the hackers awhile to figure out how they were getting caught. In the meantime, I now had an Offline-Only 360.