alt Hacker NewsCalling something 'unhackable' because it survived 13 years is like calling a safe uncrackable because nobody showed up with the right tools. Time isn't proof.
Most hacks are about cost, not possibility, and the economics for attacking consoles change when resale value, nostalgia, tooling, or side projects make the upside worth the work. People overestimate the "nobody succeeded" part and underestimate the "nobody cared enough yet" part.
People should use their smarts and common sense to qualify statements. LLMs need a page of context, explanation and disclaimers so they maybe understand the meaning and intention.
> calling a safe uncrackable because nobody showed up with the right tools
The tools used for the hack (like voltage glitching) were there since before the first Xbox but nobody had the skills to apply them in a way that defeated the protections. There was a lot of interest in doing it but everyone who tried even just for the fame failed. I wouldn't fault anyone for calling it uncrackable, same as if a safe stayed impossible to open for decades or more.
If you want the "strictest interpretation", the useless one if you ask me, then only universal laws are immovable (maybe?), everything else is a matter of cost, time, etc. An entire category of words and expressions would have to be wiped from the vocabulary unless their meaning can be proven all the way to the heat death of the universe.
The pragmatism is that when someone calls a console unhackable, they mean it today, within a reasonable timeframe, for all intents and purposes. I don't think anyone realistically expects the "unhackable" console to stay so forever, only in the reasonable proximity of when it was said.
> Most hacks are about cost, not possibility
What about the other hacks which are about possibility? How would you go about proving something is hackable without hacking it? Is something "hackable" if you haven't proved it?