Xbox 360 hackers cheat at Hexic, make inroads into hacking the 360 [Update1]

The hacking community has been very busy this weekend. Accomplishments include:

1. Successfully ripping Hexic off of a kiosk disc and executing it in a PC browser (it runs very slowly)

2. Successfully modifying Hexic and running it on an Xbox 360 connected to Xbox Live

3. Hacking Hexic to earn several of the achievements without doing any of the work

4. Successfully running simple Flash applications that were never on the Xbox 360 (such as a clock application)

5. Modifying certain aspects of the King Kong kiosk demo to create the simple program pictured here

Speculation:

• Could this third item be behind the reset of the Xbox Live leaderboards? We hear people were earning some sick scores in Hexic before the reset (according to a blog post by Xbox Live's Larry Hyrb, the reset is a technical glitch having nothing to do with security issues.)

• These findings might make it possible to run a flash-based browser, flash-based media players, or even other flash games not available on Xbox Live Arcade

• There are many avenues of research that the hacking community is exploring. Given the history of past efforts by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft to prevent modification (all to no avail), it seems inevitable that one or more of these seeds of opportunity will yield fruit

• How far away are we from a gamer points reset, given that some gamers have been able to cheat to obtain them?

• Will it become possible to cheat at other games? That's the surest way to sap the enjoyment from any game, as Halo players on Xbox Live who have been the victims of cheaters can attest.

[Update1: linked to statement from Microsoft's Larry Hyrb regarding the leaderboard reset.]