One of the many negative aspects of the latest generation of consoles is that we are dealing with glass prisons that appear to be flexible, when in reality they do not allow the execution of any secondary software. The story could soon change in the case of the Xbox One, because a group of hackers called H4LT leaked the console's SDK, corresponding to the month of November. In theory, this would lead to “homebrew” developments, and with enough effort, to the execution of copies.
No one doubts that they are computers on the inside, but with a couple of well-placed locks, their manufacturers turn them into consoles. That is basically what has happened with the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. Inside we find a variant of a Jaguar APU developed by AMD, with a total of eight cores. The appearance of the x86 architecture in the world of consoles was well received by many developers, but accessing the SDK officially is complicated, so to speak. From a certain point of view, we can all understand Microsoft and Sony's position: The idea is to commercialize content, and consoles are the means that allow this activity. However, there are people out there who want to do more with their systems than both companies allow.
Shortly before the end of the year, a group called H4LT decided to say goodbye to 2014 in style, leaking nothing less than the November SDK for the Xbox One. The first thing that comes to mind is homebrew, or homemade applications that could be run on the Xbox One without the classic verification and validation processes imposed by Microsoft. A very interesting technical detail is that through this SDK, the Redmond giant released access to the seventh core of the processor. In general, both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 enable developers to use six cores, while the other two are dedicated to the operating system. In contrast, with this SDK Microsoft opens the doors to one more core, so developers can extract more performance, provided they agree to make certain sacrifices (verbal commands in games stop working, as do the cameras integrated into Kinect).
Now, with the SDK loose, the possibility arises that some specific exploits appear, thus leading to console modification (I imagine Xbox Live will fight this practice with all its fury), and the execution of unauthorized copies. All this is still very far off on the calendar, but the big question is how H4LT managed to obtain the SDK...
