A little more Xbox 2 news: it plays surprisingly nicely with the PSP. Okay, this is just on the developer machine -- but at least we'll know that if the retail version lacks this feature, it's because Microsoft specifically went out of its way to be a jerk.

In other geeky news -- well, not news, since it's a bit old -- but here's a PDF about what the Xbox 360's security architecture might look like, written by bunnie, arguably the biggest name on the Xbox cracking scene. It's all speculation, but interesting nonetheless (well, the parts that aren't incomprehensible). The first Xbox had a number of serious security flaws -- see here for a rundown of how MS managed to cram three serious backdoors into a mere 512 bytes of code. It seems likely that they'll do a better job the second time around. Nevertheless, I'm confident the crackers will ultimately win out. If nothing else, the preceding links prove that some very smart people are willing to waste time on this stuff.

Truthfully, though, it wouldn't be so bad if they didn't manage to beat MS this time. I've got the Xbox 1, and it emulates everything short of an N64 pretty well. It's a lot harder to rationalize the need for a modchip when I already have a perfectly good emulator/media player.