I suppose, but I'd argue it's effective security if it took ten years.

I think this might be a good example of the fundamental misunderstanding of what "security" even is. It is never a binary state. Never was. And I think a lot of people don't really grok that and think that if a security block can be overcome in some manner then the thing is not secure.

Eventually Fort Knox will succumb to the unrelenting arrow of time and some future visitors will simply step over the crumbling wall and into the supposedly "secure" area.

i find this statement is often used as an excuse to not think about security at all. which is probably not what you intended here (i hope, although you did say "pointless"...), but some people parrot it for that purpose.

a) this was a security win. millions and millions of people had physical access to the device for over a decade

b) as others have said, security is not all-or-nothing. the xbox one is extremely secure, despite not being perfectly secure.

c) just because something eventually gets hacked does not mean security was pointless. delaying access is a perfectly reasonable security goal. delaying access until the product is retired and the successor is already out on the market is a huge win.

One of the DRM circumvention methods for the Xbox 360 involved precision drilling a specific depth into one of the chips on the board. Microsoft was very aware of the nature of physical access while designing this, haha.

In the talk that the security guy gave, he said it just had to cost more than 10 games for a user to enable piracy

This seems like an unqualified win for the security measure. The future value of Xbox One DRM is probably close to zero. They already got what they wanted out of it.

I can give you a piece of paper with a one time pad encoded secret, where the one time is physically destroyed. You can take all the time you want but you will not crack anything…

I’m pretty skeptical of that lesson. This took 13 years and it’s cheap mass-market hardware.

Better stop locking your doors, then.

'pointless' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

This console went completely unhacked for 12 years, with this coming a solid 4 years after the hardware was discontinued. They kept piracy off the console for its whole lifespan, which was the entire point of these security measures. This is a massive success for the Xbox security team.

You do have a credit card, right?