The age old battle between hackers and copy protection continues, this time with the hackers gaining a potentially huge victory over the Xbox 360. It appears that the firmware for the Toshiba-Samsung H943 DVD drive (one of two drives available in the Xbox 360) has been, as they say, hacked. In a nutshell, once the hacked firmware is put onto the DVD drive, it will be able to read and boot 1:1 copies of games. Now, this isn't as easy to do a just installing a plug-in modchip into the system, but requires some technical know-how on the user's part in order to flash the new firmware, never mind that only DVD+DL discs are supported. Of course, you void your warranty by doing this, not to mention your soul if you use it for nefarious ends, but news is news. It also probably isn't a good idea to try using this on Xbox Live either, seeing as though Microsoft will more than likely throw your console into Purgatory, preventing you from yelling obscenities at total strangers.
360 Firmware Hacked [Kotaku]