> While SHiFT insists that the method of smudging your disc will give you enough time in a lag to beat the SpongeBob game, he adds a clear caveat that it's not worth the risk of permanently damaging your game or original Xbox console

How would reading a scratched/dirty disc permanently damage a console? That seems like a very bad issue for a device expected to read frequently swapped discs.

There's a belief in certain corners of the gaming community (and maybe other communities that deal with optical discs) that if the disc drive's laser has to "try hard" to read a disc it will eventually "burn out". Not sure if this is backed up by any actual data or facts - it sounds plausible to me that a laser might dynamically adjust its power level as needed, and that over time that might be bad for it; but it also sounds a bit like people might be anthropomorphizing the laser or something.

This article is hard to read, it seems to repeat itself constantly and expands on nothing. The main point is that smudging the disc can help with performing certain glitches while the console is trying to run error correction but you could potentially scratch your disc to an unusable state if you are too liberal with the smudging. I'm pretty sure I've seen this same topic on HN before so this article isn't exactly reporting on anything new.

Well - ketchup on your disc may drip on the the laser diode - don't you think it's hard to defend against? maybe they need lens wipers against ketchup on the disc issue.

there are a bunch of videos on youtube explaining it. The belief is the game streams data from the disc. Smudges cause read errors on some laser passes that don't fail to read entirely. The effective throughput goes down. This causes the games overall processing of each iteration to somehow be impacted, leading to the behavior the speedrunners use to save time.

The disc's spin pretty fast, I could see someone smudging the disc too heavily with a substance that might fling off