When the news came out that hackers had jumped on the opportunity to tinker with Microsoft’s new Kinect game controller — making it do “things it really wasn’t meant to do,” in the words of a New York Times reporter — most of the coverage was very inside-baseball. Some stories claimed that the hackers’ activity was a source of great consternation to Microsoft. Others quoted company officials claiming Microsoft had deliberately “left a back door open” to allow for such user creativity.