In many ways I think it is really quite sad that we're at a point where blown e-fuses, encrypted everything and properly done public/private key crypto means that it's entirely possible that next generation of consoles really might actually be unhackable and unbackupable, barring some tiny bootloader exploit, cheap TEM and an understanding of "physically uncloneable functions", or cheap and plentiful qubits.
Things like this are just cool, prevent e-waste, and preserve cultural heritage.
> In many ways I think it is really quite sad that we're at a point where blown e-fuses, encrypted everything and properly done public/private key crypto means that it's entirely possible that next generation of consoles really might actually be unhackable
Pirates will always find a way, the Nintendo Switch had all the countermeasures you mentioned, the latest revisions also have a patched bootloader but someone figured out that they could still boot a custom firmware via power fault injection on the SoC.
Nintendo (or rather Nvidia) was behind the curve on fault injection counter-measures, Sony and Microsoft did their homework and it's never been achieved on their last two generations of systems as far as I know. Microsoft openly talked about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo
Seriously, console security is getting really good. The Switch had some major hardware blunders between the bootloader bug and fault injection, but the developer of the main Switch CFW project is on record that their custom microkernel is absolutely bulletproof and he expects there will never be another software exploit. If Switch 2 gets the hardware right, there's no way in.
The Playstation is the weakest of the bunch, since they run FreeBSD on bare metal there's a large attack surface and a lot of eyes on the code. The Xbox uses some variant of NT but each application gets its own Hyper-V virtualized NT instance, so to jailbreak you need to escape Hyper-V, which is easier said than done and has a $250,000 bug bounty so MS would probably be the first to be informed.
When I bought a $60 game in 1996, I knew it was a complete product. It might have a bug that made it impossible to finish, but returns are a solved problem. I knew I had a product that was made, possibly incompetently, for fun, or to tell a story.
I wasn't buying something that was trying to nudge me into spending another $400 on different pixel colors, or worse, different characters, abilities, or effects.
Modern video games have adopted techniques used by the gambling industry to trigger essentially addiction, because game companies prefer 3 whales to a thousand happy individuals buying the game a single time and playing it forever happily.
Because they were not satisfied with making a million dollars off a video game. That wasn't enough money.
You used to be able to buy games used for a tiny fraction of the original price, and you used to be able to sell games you finished or didn't like. Now you have to pay the full price, every time, irreversibly.
Here's the thing: if I can't afford a game because it's so outrageously expensive, I'm not going to just not play it and miss out, I'm going to pirate it.
And now that I'm an adult who totally can afford these things (after bypassing all the roadblocks that the world's entertainment companies put for customers from Russia), I still pirate everything because that's what I'm used to, and that's what I'm convenient with.
That's fine, the problem is people acting like it's outrageous to charge $60 for 100+ hour length multi-million dollar projects. Factorio recently increased its price by $5 to $35 in line with inflation and gamers are outraged. How dare they charge more money, it's totally immoral, etc. I don't get why people feel outraged about it.
My main complaint is not that games cost this much money, but rather about digital distribution. Especially with console games, it used to be such that you could buy pre-owned cartridges/discs and sell yours. It was really cheap to you, and technically the game developers also got their asking price for each copy they sold. You were also able to swap games with friends who had the same type of console.
With digital distribution, you still pay the full price, but your copy is "single-use" in essence. You're never getting any of that money back. And, the only way to buy games digitally is "new" for that full price.
You don't pay for the labour to produce it, you pay for a gamble over an investment.
The labour to produce the game can totally be paid if the price of the game is reduced but the amount of copies sold increase by a significant amount to make up for the price reduction.
And wallet and income of the consumers in region X of the world do not stretch magically because game companies in region Y decide to invest more on games. It is not that simple.
While I'm not saying most people by far aren't doing it to save money, I have bought switch games and then emulated them just to try the graphics at 4k 60fps that isn't possible on the console.
That's the part I'm sad about - that we won't get emulated games that look and feel better due to faster hardware in the future. Money isn't an issue for me.
It seems surprising to me that they went from shipping a vulnerable WebKit with numerous public CVEs on day 1, to producing a more or less bulletproof OS?
"console security is getting really good." - It's not nor will it ever be.
There is no point in investing extra millions for let's say anti electron microscope measures for example. Developers aim for secure enough and don't care much about a single nerd who cracked his individual system using exotic specialists tools more valuable than the console and the entire game collection combined. It's more lucrative to just send a lawyer. ( Until it goes wrong. )
I would class making it uneconomical to hack a console for any practical purpose as "really good security". Could someone with nation-state resources hack the Xbox? Maybe? But who cares, they're not going to.
Funny, I was just wondering if such an entity would not actually quite like the xbox and Playstation as targets. I mean, they are powerful machines, well connected to the internet and the ownership class by and large dont blink when they power them on and are told they need to download a system update or game patch. Feels like a fertile place to build a bot net?
I wonder if you really even need to hack the console. It might be easier to, say, subvert Rockstar's supply chain to put some code in the next GTA that spent a few cycles doing whatever botnets need to be doing.
Tony Chen even addresses this directly in the video above.
They literally had a hard line in the sand. $600. If it costs more than $600 to hack it then they really don't care.
The other big thing is games being locked to a specific OS version, meaning some games require updates to play them. This has been key in their security strategy. It's basically pointless to hack it, it will be patched and you'll have to opt in to the patch to play anything new.
Another smart move by Microsoft was shipping Xboxes in an uninitialized state that has to connect to the internet and download the latest firmware before it can be used. Sony has been repeatedly burned by patching an exploit but having the vulnerable firmware still pre-installed on machines still in retail channels, so someone willing to abuse return policies can easily get one. MS doesn't need to worry about that, every new Xbox ends up on the latest firmware regardless of when it was manufactured.
PS5 and XS was attractive hack target for crypto mining when it was boom and GPU were in shortage. I wonder anyone had hacked it (and keep it secret) or hadn't.
>There is no point in investing extra millions for let's say anti electron microscope measures for example.
TPM designs that protect against such an attack will become a commodity reducing the cost to include it onto a console. Every desktop, phone, laptop, tablet, microwave, fridge, server, etc will all need TPMs. The demand and scale exists for this to become cheap over time.
Except it's usually not pirates who find these exploits, rather curious tinkerers that want to unlock the full capabilities of the hardware that they own. The pirates / script kiddies usually come in after the groundwork has already been laid by these true hackers. E.g. the people who hacked the Switch in fact condemn piracy and any discussion of it on within their communities will lead to an immediate ban.
I'm proud to say that I've hacked my Switch, but have never pirated anything on it. An impressive homebrew scene has formed around the console, which has produced gems such as Mission Control, allowing you to seamlessly pair third party controllers. I use it with my PS4 controllers.
it saddens me as a vintage games conservator that my present day PS4 will be a brick in a few years. When I have consoles and games going back 40 years. It just doesn’t seem right.
The thing that has me concerned is that even if you keep the consoles working, and even if you have an extensive library of physical media, these days what’s on the disc is probably an unpatched, incomplete, possibly unplayable mess.
That’s not intended as a criticism of game development, just an expression of fear for the preservation implications. It’s no longer enough to preserve what’s in your hands—which is difficult enough where electronics are concerned—but now someone must find some way to extract, archive, and reapply all the day one patches, bug fixes, DLC packs etc.
> someone must find some way to extract, archive, and reapply all the day one patches, bug fixes, DLC packs etc.
This is what has to happen. I believe that as these consequences become more and more widely felt you’ll have a pretty strong mandate for some kind of change in thinking.
I mean, if you’ve actually bought the game (as opposed to streamed it) I think there’s a strong case to be made that you should be entitled to its use beyond the wishes of the copyright holder.
I mean this as earnestly as possible: remember that pain and don't buy a PS5, or a PS6, or
[...] Don't build any more emotional relationships with products built by rentiers that refuse to respect your ability to enjoy the perpetuity of your license (and god forbid even considering actually owning anything). Take on an allotment and breed a new hybrid chili pepper, or brew some beer and share it with your neighbors. Beat Galaga for the 11,000th time. Whatever it takes. To hell with Huxley's Brave New World-- a better one is possible if we force it to exist by refusing to continue enabling the system enslaving us.
I don't know. Maybe. I've gone back and forth on this many times.
Wanting to play a video game, and having to learn how to free up enough conventional memory in DOS that I could do so without giving up sound and joystick control, was really my entry into tech. I can't say my life would have been better without them.
On the other hand, they're as much of a time sink as you allow them to be, and in the last decade are increasingly also vying to be an unlimited money sink in the form of microtransactions, lootboxes, gimped free-to-play (or even pay-to-play!) with progression held back without paid boosts, etc. Should we want to engage with such dark patterns?
Once I got into Linux in the mid 90s, and especially once I really bought into the whole FL/OSS-as-an-ethos activist/evangelist stuff as a late-teen, my gaming options became quite limited. I spent a long time saying playing video games was bad, and a sign of poor life choices. I dialed back my rhetoric as I entered my late 30s, and I own and occasionally use a Steam Deck now. I even "own" Diablo 4 - failing to take my own advice here - but I do find it difficult to convince myself to invest time in what is essentially an MMO that will probably be reset or switched off at some point. There's no sense of permanence, and I have no faith that MicrosoftActivisionBlizzard will keep running D4 services for the next 25 years the way Blizzard did for Diablo II.
But I've got the farm now, and that will outlast me, so whatever. "Touch grass" as the kids say, but as a(n a)vocation.
That's certainly more than you wanted to read. Sorry.
OTOH, has there really been any actually culturally significant video games released in recent years?
I enjoyed for example the Uncharted games a lot. But I don’t think anything significant will have been lost if future generations of people don’t get to play the Uncharted games, no matter how much I enjoyed them myself.
Whereas, things like Pong, and Pac-Man and the first Super Mario games and the Pokémon Red and Blue and Yellow games feel much more important for me, and of course the original Doom, all of these are important on a whole other level. And thankfully they are all sure to be able to be preserved at least in some form.
There's been plenty of amazing and culturally relevant games recently, you just have rose tinted glasses for the time you grew up in (or you haven't been gaming much). I'll just list a handful of really well known ones.
* Basically everything FromSoft has put out (With Dark Souls 1 and Elden Ring probably being the most important - Dark Souls effectively kicked off an entire genre because of it's popularity (technically Demon's Souls came first, but Dark Souls was the first one to blow up).)
* Breath of the Wild
* Escape from Tarkov also kicked off a new genre in the extraction shooter, although noone else has quite nailed it yet imo.
* The Witcher 3 (heavily influentual towards the design of Breath of the Wild, and a number of other open world rpgs recently)
* As someone else pointed out, Baldurs Gate 3
* Skyrim
* Minecraft
* Dwarf Fortress (not exactly recent, but the Steam release propelled it into being much more well known)
* Path of Exile arguably revolutionized the diablo-style ARPG genre - any ARPG that comes out now is influenced by it - see Last Epoch for probably the biggest example.
Whether a game is "culturally relevant" or not really just hinges off of whether a significantly large portion of the population plays and talks about it for long enough though.
These days we get so many more quality game releases than we ever did in the 90s/2000s so it's much harder for a single game to grab everybody's attention in the same way that the stuff you mentioned did.
We’re also finally getting games that have genuinely good writing in them, not just writing that’s good for the sliding scale that usually applies to interactive media.
- Disco Elysium is a role-playing game largely about self-discovery and identity
- Kentucky Route Zero is a reflection on mortality and the true costs of poverty
- NORCO is a meditation on death and survivorship with meanderings into environmentalism and groupthink/cult thinking
To be fair many of the games on this list would be trivial to preserve as long as windows remains backwards compatible with older software, and not too hard even after that. Breath of the wild and Tarkov stands out as exceptions
The PoE of 11 years ago isn't the PoE that people rave about today, though. That's more of the past 6-7 years through today.
You skipped over mentioning Elden Ring, with it being from 2022.
Some others from the 2020s:
Hades, 2020
Animal Crossing, 2020
Among Us, 2020
Vampire Survivors, 2022
Half Life Alyx, 2020 (Still probably the only real example of a "true" AAA VR game)
I think it's tough to say what games will be long-term culturally significant when they've only been out a year or two, though. I think it's easier to look back in that 5-15 year range and see what stood up.
> I think it's tough to say what games will be long-term culturally significant when they've only been out a year or two, though. I think it's easier to look back in that 5-15 year range and see what stood up.
This is exactly what I was thinking when writing this list, along with noting that OP mentioned games from the late 90's at the latest - my timeline for "recent" was pretty wide.
---
"Culturally Relevant" to me means one of two things:
* So many people played the damn thing that it entered the public consciousness outside of gaming focused communities, and stayed there for a decent amount of time.
* It had a significant and fairly enduring influence on the design of later titles made by other studios.
You can tell within a few months whether a game is in the former category (Elden Ring, Palworld, Minecraft, Among Us, BG3 etc), but it takes years to know whether a game is in the second category (Dark Souls, also Minecraft to an extent, Path of Exile, Witcher 3, Tarkov etc).
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of great and impactful games from recent years, I was just struck that the list of "recent" games were particularly old from the perspective of actual new games like the ones you mention. I missed the mention of Elden Ring in the original post, it wasn't deliberate on my part to skip it.
And indeed, PoE of 11 years ago isn't comparable, even PoE pre-delirium probably isn't recognisable to current PoE, and anything pre Incursion certainly isn't, but that's the nature of a live-service game. The power creep post-conquerors has been incredible, and there's been essentially no effort to bring that in after they decided that a reset with PoE2 would be preferable than trying to rein in power creep in modern PoE, and that adding upper end aspiration content instead was preferable.
The decision to rein in power with expedition backfired so hard that people still complain they don't have an item editor with harvest. ( Although with Locks it's come pretty close again at the right cost. )
I think they made a good choice, PoE is better than ever, but it's controversial, and every patch post 3.14 has had a lot of detractors claiming that "PoE is ruined".
In terms of cultural impact, it's still interesting that it's such an "old" game that's having an impact on (gaming) culture.
If we're talking about wider culture, you're right that "culturally significant" can take time to materialise. I'm not sure Alyx or even Hades really makes the cut. They're great games of their genre but I don't think they've had the cut through that the others you've listed have had.
Among Us was a cultural phenomenon that was immediately visible outside of gaming, akin to something like Fortnite although perhaps magnified by the pandemic massively boosting streaming audiences and people looking for some kind of social connection through the internet.
Survivors has had a massive impact on gaming, it's created a genre of it's own ("Survivors-like" is a thing) which can be seen with the release of "DeepRockGalactic: Survivors" which is a great improvement on the genre. It's fair to say that while Vampire Survivors itself might not have the cultural cut through, it defined a genre of games that have inspired clones from Brotato to DRG and deserves its place on that list if we're looking at gaming culture, but it's too soon to say if we're looking at culture outside of gaming.
> OTOH, has there really been any actually culturally significant video games released in recent years?
Yes, like -random example here- Uncharted :-P.
TBH i do not think what is "culturally significant" is something that we can answer right now, but something that will be up to future people to decide.
Though i do think that Uncharted is culturally significant in how it was part of a series of influences from the original Indiana Jones, to Tomb Raider, to Uncharted and back to Tomb Raider (in that each one of those influenced the next) - with some Prince of Persia thrown in for good measure. But for people to be able to tell, judge and discover these things, the games must be available to them - preferably in their original condition (remasters, rereleases, remakes, etc often tend to change things - though those should also be available so these changes can also be seen and perhaps talked about in the future).
Also not only "good games" or "influential games" are worthy of preservation - even bad or just mediocre game are worthy of that, for a variety of reasons. Games are often a snapshot of the times they were made at and multiple "snapshots" are always better than a single one. Even from a design perspective, a bad game can be interesting: for example the original Prince of Persia 3D seems to have been largely lost in the sands of time and yet it is an interesting game in its own right despite its flaws, in how its interpretation of (classic) Tomb Raider's controls combined with ideas from the original 2D games around realistic/captured animation ended up creating something inferior to its clear inspirations (but that is clear only really if you know about/have played the games that inspired it and know about/have played the game itself).
Of course if you just want to have fun, whatever is available on Steam will more than suffice.
Completely agree with this take. What is culturally significant? Things that impact culture more than "is it a good game".
Advanced Lawnmower Simulator probably has more cultural significance than "Another Call Of Duty 7", since I remember it from my childhood and an article gets posted that mentions it at least once a year. Does that make it a good game?
The problem is that the lockout and anti-privacy tech developed for consoles tends to metastasize over to general-purpose computers, like with signed executables, gatekeeper, secure boot, etc. People would oppose development of it otherwise, like they did for the Clipper Chip and the original Palladium proposal. Having an appliance where software """needs""" to be """protected""" from the machine's owner allows that stuff to fly under the radar until it's already bulletproof.
How recent are we talking about? Did you miss Breath of the Wild? Super Mario Odyssey? The Last of Us 2? Red Dead Redemption 2? Hollow Knight? Elden Ring? Half Life Alyx? Hell, Pokemon Go qualifies for cultural recognition.
I think Pokémon Go was a much more visible and impactful phenomenon (in certain places) than anything else on your list. This might be different to "cultural importance" depending on your definition.
I mean did random churches and libraries have "Playing Red Dead Redemption 2 is not allowed here" signs up?
Were there flash mobs in NYC playing Half Life Alyx?
Plus they haven't made a good exclusive since Bloodborne. No Xbox exclusives afaik.
Don't worry, gaming peaked a long time ago. There's a huge backlog of great games that are better than their remakes like XCOM. Aside from graphics, I'd say AAA gameplay has even regressed in many ways. Indie games do their own thing and run on PC.
As Vulnerability Research is my area of expertise we are finding new attack vectors all the time. Remember with new technology and abstraction you introduce new potential security issues that can be used to subvert other means of protection. It’s a tit for tat non ending cycle. That being said exploitation of consoles and phones has become quite difficult. Enough at least to make me move to embedded security as there is more work to be done there..
I think there’s some hope in the console market via the likes of things like the Steamdeck and other handheld PC devices. Hopefully they’ll get cheaper as time goes on and compete at the same price point as the switch.
This soothes my soul seeing exploits for the consoles I grew up with. For a second it takes me back to a simpler time. The homebrew scene for the XBOX was more fun than the console itself!
A while back I saw this clickbait video of "Gen Z trying out the original XBOX" and man that was a reality check as to how much time has passed.
Hacking the original Xbox + x360 is what I credit as getting me "really into computers"
For OG xbox, I was a definition script kiddie but I learned how to use FTP, how to connect via crossover cable, how to solder, the basics of what exploits are and how they work, and a ton of other skills that I use daily.
X360 required me to take the damn thing apart (which was terrifying as a 14 year old who wouldn't get a replacement if I broke things). I learned about firmware, SATA connections, the bits (I forget the name) that specify whether something was retail or not, why the exploit wouldn't let you run unsigned code, etc.
I was just a broke kid who wanted to watch movies and play games I couldn't afford, but it literally got me into tinkering and hacking, even though what I was doing wasn't much more than "follow a guide, script kiddy"
Same here for the OG Xbox. Lots of TSOP flashes for friends over SSH after booting a saved game exploit for 007: Agent Under Fire. Reading lots of the forums on xbox-scene.com. Learned to solder with a soldering iron I picked up from the local Radioshack.
Ditto for me with the OG XBOX. I was in high school and had no clue what I was doing with static ip addresses and crossover cables. We didn't even have a router hence the static ip address. Each cool homebrew XBE I FTP'ed over to my XBOX was another exciting adventure!
My computing journey started earlier on DOS but XBOX kept me going through a period of post 9/11 depression where the excitement of childhood and an amazing future was slowly disappearing. I stopped even playing video games after the end of the XBOX lifecycle (despite continuing to buy new gen hardware just so I could take it apart and admire the internals).
Now living in the post ChatGPT days and wondering about my future, i'm looking back wishing I could live through those late nights one more time.
For me it was creating “gift card code generator” for games like Habbo Hotel and RuneScape in C# and distribute it among my friends to get into their accounts. 14 year old me was proud of my “hacking” skills.
You do raise a good point as Gen Z is around 1997-2012 (exact dates are always a little fuzzy)
So 97 would put you around 4-5 years old when the XBOX came out.
The video made it look like the XBOX was some ancient artifact to the Gen Z people. I guess if you were born in 2012 it is an ancient artifact?
This is awesome. I remember back in 2006 I bought every copy of MechAssault that my local Game Stop had and hoped that one was the correct revision such that it was compatible with the Krayzie Ndure softmod exploit, and used it to install Xbox Media Center (XBMC). It's from that setup that I learned how computer networking works. I credit basically my entire career with reading about softmods at the back of a Popular Science magazine.
Anyway, it's awesome that you'll eventually be able to softmod an Xbox without a specific game once the mods are integrated with this exploit. Good work!
Aside: og xbox is not so expensive 2nd hand and a great way to set up a kids lan party. 1 old router, 3 xboxes, 3 tvs, 12 controllers, Halo gets you 10 year-olds' mayhem. Noisy fun. Arguably easier if xboxes are modded.
modded oG xbox's or even X360s are a great living room centerpiece.
oG Xbox, Xlink Kai is still a thing. It was my first experience playing online as a poor 12 year old script kiddie myself.
For X360 LAN parties, It took a long time to find, but the hard-coded 4ms ping limit for "LAN" mode was removed, so LAN parties can be split into neighborhood LAN parties without problems
I have the same use case but with Xbox 360s since they are cheaper and easier to get here in Germany.
Haven't found a better "easy LAN party" setup than this.
A PC gaming LAN setup for 20 year old games is also dirt cheap but mostly requires 1 PC per player. The splitt screen support on PC is unfortunately very bad.
The difficulty is in turning a userland exploit into a useful jailbreak, there will always be parser bugs and WebKit bugs but those are only the first step in the chain. From there you need to escape the sandbox and that's the part which keeps getting more difficult.
The "unhackable" Xbox One has had at least one userland exploit via attacking the web browser, but nothing came of it because they weren't able to break out of Hyper-V.
ive been trying to hack the XB1 for a year now and only have two potential exploits of only one i will release because it cant be patched, maybe spoof your device family. im researching and just stumble apon 100 posts like this
The original Xbox was locked down so only code signed by Microsoft was allowed to run on it. The executables also had a flag specifying which media it was allowed to run from. This meant that you couldn't run a game from a copied disc (different media-type) or the internal hard drive (again, different media-type).
There were plenty of hacks that allowed you to circumvent this. Once you get some form of code execution on the Xbox, it's over, everything runs in Ring 0, meaning you get full access. You can use exploitable executables to maintain persistence without having to do any hardware modifications. However, all these methods relied on an initial entry through either:
A. Installing new hardware (a modchip) to run an altered version of the Microsoft Xbox kernel that doesn't perform the usual checks.
B. Transferring an altered save game to the Xbox through the memory card (internally it's just a USB drive), running the game and loading the save, which triggers an exploit
C. Booting the console (which unlocks the hard drive), waiting until the hard drive activity ceases, "hotswapping" the IDE cable to your computer, modifying the files, swapping it back and turning the console off so the drive locks again. (If the hard drive loses power, it locks itself again too, hence why the hotswap-which is not supported by the PATA standard obviously-is needed)
Now, with this, there is no more reliance on bespoke modchip hardware, aging vulnerable game discs or machines that you can still hotswap an IDE drive to. Which means that Xbox modding has gotten more reliable for the coming years. Which is good news in my book.
Oh man! That hot swap method! I remember my computer, running Linux (which freaked 14 year old me out) from a live cd, case open, and plugging in the hdd while the Xbox and pc was on.
I felt like a warlock when I could rip my games after that.
Great memories.
And my mate at school saying there is no such thing as a soft mod! Haha
I recall our progression was chipmod, drivemod, softmod- really didn’t use the softmod much because we had so many chipmodded devices, but we didn’t do much online then.
I guess the younger generation grew up with unmoddable consoles, so the concept is less known nowadays. The older audience immediately knows that it's for. You can run free homebrew apps, games, and if you really wanted, with a little more code, run pirated copies of retail games, and cheats. If you had a PS1 or Xbox, you got it modchipped by some classmate, everyone did in the 2000s, it was rampant, at least at my school. I still remember bunnie, who was famous online for first hacking the xbox. Hardmods required some soldering, Softmods just required a particular game and flashdrive. This new one just requires a memory card. They didn't fully softmod it for legal reasons but they did the hard part. Since it's such an old console, it's really just a novelty that they found another method.
PS3, PS4, Xbox, PSP, DS, vita, switch and maybe PS5 all have hacks.
Phones came out and killed homebrew. Now the developers developed cool super compatible stuff without needing you to hack the hardware plus games became stagnant on consoles. The PSP when I bought it was known as a boring rehash console with nothing but re-releases but the hardware made it worth it.
2000s homebrew powered things like XBMC which were many people’s first introduction to the reality that hard drives had far outstripped DVDs in capacity.
Things like this are just cool, prevent e-waste, and preserve cultural heritage.