Xbox 360 ISO in the wild

After an all-too-brief Christmas holiday, I’m back at work, back to the grind. And I’m sure that all of you are probably still in the workless void, but some of us are back at it, now. In my nigh impossible quest to catch up on any news while I was “away”, I noticed that an intrepid team of Xbox 360 hackers have distributed the Xbox 360 Kiosk Demo as an ISO image. Apparently, if you burn this to a DVD-R, it will run on any Xbox 360.

That’s right. It has no media protection of ANY kind.

What is most remarkable about this is the obvious implication for Xbox 360 game piracy. Will any burned executable run on an Xbox 360? Does this preclude the need for any kind of “modchip”?

*boggle*

Naturally, I would assume that normal Xbox 360 games must have SOME sort of copy protection… right? Then again, I would’ve assume demo discs to be protected as well. For instance, a burned copy of an old Xbox demo disc will not run on a vanilla (non-modded) Xbox.

I guess this will teach me to make assumptions about next-gen copy protection.