alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
> What changed here is less the existence of the technique and more the instrumentation and persistence.
The instrumentation from 13 years ago is perfectly capable of pulling this off technically. I won't go into the proof that "human persistence" existed prior to 2026 aplenty.
But the discussion wasn't why the Xbox got hacked today, as much as the semantics of whether you are allowed to call something "unhackable" just because at the time of the statement nobody managed despite a lot of time and effort. I wouldn't mind the "linguistic absolutism" if it came from people who never used this kind of expression - one that is interpreted in the strictest sense no matter what. Instead this logic mostly comes from people who want to sound smart correcting without adding to the conversation or understanding the context. Think of all those parroting the "what an idiot to say 640K should be fine for everyone" meme.
> The underlying weakness was probably always there
Probably? You championed precise language. What's the alternative, that the silicon vulnerability developed in time?