alt Hacker NewsPeople 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?
The distinction between "possible" and "economically viable" tends to collapse in practice. For hardware like this, people usually mean something closer to "no known attack within a realistic budget and skill envelope."
Voltage glitching has been around for a long time, but applying it against a tightly constrained boot chain with limited observability is a different class of problem. You are essentially searching a high-dimensional timing space with very little feedback. That is where most prior attempts seem to have failed.
What changed here is less the existence of the technique and more the instrumentation and persistence. Once you can reliably characterize the system’s behavior at that level, "unhackable" turns into "not yet mapped."
I think the safe analogy still holds if you interpret it as "no one had a stethoscope sensitive enough until now." The underlying weakness was probably always there, but practically inaccessible.