Soon after Kinect's launch a little while back, it was already rigged by a software wizard to interface with a PC, an act Microsoft got a little annoyed about. However, it turns out neither the Kinect or Xbox algorithms were "hacked", instead the engineer wrote an open-source code to open the USB connection.

"What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection," said director of incubation at Microsoft, Alex Kipman, during a discussion on NPR radio. "Which we didn't protect by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor. The sensor again, as I talked earlier, has eyes and ears and that's a whole bunch of, you know, noise that someone needs to take and turn into signal..."

When pushed by the show's host about anyone getting in any kind of trouble for this sort of tampering, Alex responded with a sobering "Nope. Absolutely not."

Pretty cool, especially given how precious other publishers (*cough* Sony *cough*) are about their technologies and software.