People often ask why I spent months building an end-to-end encrypted communications platform for a console released in 2001. Some people are fascinated by it, and others think it's so niche that it wasn't worth the time.
The honest answer is pretty simple: I believe privacy should be the standard, not a premium feature.
While working on xb.live and a handful of other original Xbox projects, I kept running into the same problem. Modern software assumes modern infrastructure, modern protocols, and modern hardware. The original Xbox has none of those. If I wanted secure networking, reliable data transfer, or communication with modern services, I was going to have to build it myself.
That challenge became XNET.
The original goal wasn't just encrypted chat. I wanted to answer a series of questions that kept bouncing around in my head:
Can the original Xbox support true end-to-end encryption?
Can I build modern networking on hardware that predates smartphones?
Can I reverse engineer enough of the hardware to support additional USB 1.1 devices?
Can I create a secure tunnel capable of moving data reliably without corruption?
Can a 20+ year-old console communicate securely with PCs and mobile devices?
Three months later, after thousands of lines of code, more than 150 development iterations, and over 30 private community tests, I had my answer.
Yes.
What started as a networking experiment became a platform. XNET opened the door to secure console-to-console communication, PC and mobile integration, and a foundation for future projects that simply wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
I also wanted to remove the biggest barrier to entry. Instead of asking users to configure servers or host their own infrastructure, I stood up a public relay network in Europe. The idea is simple: install XNET, connect, and it just works. You don't even need to understand what an IP is, or how to install the relay yourself, anybody can use it for free.
More than anything, XNET represents something I enjoy about engineering. I like taking hardware that people have written off and asking, "What if we're not actually at the limit?" Sometimes the answer is another few weeks of debugging, sometimes it's another thousand lines of code, and sometimes it is sheer determination to make something new happen. I understand that XNET isn't for everybody, and the amount of people who use it would have absolutely not justified the cost of standing it up and maintaining it in a software company. As long as XNET is being trusted by people to communicate, I will keep the lights on.
That's why I built XNET.