Ever wonder how some NDA leakers get tracked down by developers and publishers? Often it comes down to small little tricks hidden within the programming, and any private beta worth its salt has some form of protection. This apparently included the internal beta of Xbox 360’s New Xbox Experiences UI, according to some Microsoft employees.

Posting about it on Twitter, user @cullend mentioned that one of his favorite projects while working in Microsoft was finding out how to slyly project an Xbox 360’s serial number in the waves beneath the Xbox logo:

One of the most fun jobs I ever had was figuring out how to embed the serial number of your Xbox 360 into rings emanating from the bottom right, so we could track and identify leaks pic.twitter.com/i8knGgMTvz

— Cullen (@cullend) December 9, 2018

For anyone new to the development or testing process, both commercially or internally, most users are asked to agree to non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) which they will be penalized for breaching. In case you miss what they are talking about, focus on these rings here:



While this may just look like normal graphic design to make a cool wave-like reflection, this would actually break down into numbers that would tell Microsoft the machine that the leak came from.

Even more interesting, the strategy worked. In a follow-up reply from Microsoft’s Jason Short, he affirmed that there “was more than one internal person busted that way”:

Yes. There was more than one internal person busted that way.

— Jason Short (@shortproof) December 10, 2018

Thankfully, this didn’t affect the gaming scene at large. While NXE would later ship after the successful beta, it wasn’t shipped with this identifier included. This method of identifying leaks was only used internally to track NDA-breakers within Microsoft:

No, this was only NDA’d betas

— Cullen (@cullend) December 9, 2018

Posted: Dec 18, 2018 7:08 am
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/xbox-360-nda-trick-nxe/