Most hacks are about cost, not possibility, and the economics for attacking consoles change when resale value, nostalgia, tooling, or side projects make the upside worth the work. People overestimate the "nobody succeeded" part and underestimate the "nobody cared enough yet" part.
> calling a safe uncrackable because nobody showed up with the right tools
The tools used for the hack (like voltage glitching) were there since before the first Xbox but nobody had the skills to apply them in a way that defeated the protections. There was a lot of interest in doing it but everyone who tried even just for the fame failed. I wouldn't fault anyone for calling it uncrackable, same as if a safe stayed impossible to open for decades or more.
If you want the "strictest interpretation", the useless one if you ask me, then only universal laws are immovable (maybe?), everything else is a matter of cost, time, etc. An entire category of words and expressions would have to be wiped from the vocabulary unless their meaning can be proven all the way to the heat death of the universe.
The pragmatism is that when someone calls a console unhackable, they mean it today, within a reasonable timeframe, for all intents and purposes. I don't think anyone realistically expects the "unhackable" console to stay so forever, only in the reasonable proximity of when it was said.
> Most hacks are about cost, not possibility
What about the other hacks which are about possibility? How would you go about proving something is hackable without hacking it? Is something "hackable" if you haven't proved it?
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.
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?
