Microsoft Bans Modded 360s From Xbox Live

thats now f**ked so many people lol !!! about time i was speaking to one of my hacking mate the other week and he said that it was going to happen soon

I used to be able to play pirated games, now no more. Its all because of the nigger, they come down from Harlem and mod xboxes and get good white folk banned from xbox live. I encourage all of you to beat a nigger to death today!

Firstly, how is modding an XBox cheating?

Secondly, either there aren't many people this will affect anyway, or otherwise, Microsoft is going to lose a significant number of XBL members. No one's going to buy a new XBox just for this.

Ultimately, though, hackers will obviously somehow find a way around this anyway, so big deal!

Yes, some hackers will find a way around it. Then Microsoft will find a way to detect it and ban them again. Then another way will be found... and on it goes. But personally, I just want to play on Live with my 360, thats what I bought it for.

It isn't, at least in and of itself its not...it could concievably allow cheating though (I know it did on the old Xbox)

Bottom line, MS knows that if your box isn't modded you can't be cheating.

Addendum: This will hammer casual moddees. If you are a brainless twit who got his 'box modded for you and have not the knowledge or ability to do it yourself, you're screwed. I believe theres also an issue as to which DVD drive you have. Someone I know had to replace their DVD drive and had to 'spoof' the firmware to make it think that it still had the same kind of drive in it.

Additional Bottom Line: MS probably knows that they can't completely eliminate this problem, what they can do is devote just enough energy to it to prevent it from being too easy and widespread.

its dick heads like you that make it so that the price of games are so high
every time that you download a game instead of buying it that company that you just STOLE from losses money its people like you that killed the dreamcast (if you want a game buy it!!!!!!!!!)

Umm, no.

First off, you're patently incorrect. Second off...why are you even responding to such anonymous drivel, the rest of his post is either a poor joke or...no, must be a bad joke, no ones that ignorant. I mean everyone knows that the serious Xbox modding scene in the NYC area is based in Spanish Harlem and is run by the Nyorican Yakuza. The, err, ethnic group in question run the counterfeit Pokemon card racket. [Politcally Incorrect Pokemon Name expunged]

Any idiot knows that, sheesh. Elliot is obviosly insane.

"its dick heads like you that make it so that the price of games are so high "




Um,yes . Why the hell do you think 10-track CDs are still $16.99? Millions of shameless downloaders-also known as thieves. If you swipe someone's purse with $200 it's stealing. If you hack into someone's bank account and withdraw $200 it's stealing. If you illegally download $200 worth of pirated music or video game ROMs...yes, good for you, you've guessed it, lad-it's STEALING.

Whether physically making contact with dollar bills/merchandise or doing so electronically THE PRINCIPAL IS THE SAME.

Also, cheaters are pathetic, unskilled gamers. People that use strategy guides, too...

Wow, you might have chosen a better example...you just happened to pick the absolute worst example in the history of intellectual property. Either you're too young to remember way back when before there was such a thing as the Internet, or file sharing, or CD-Rs or you just choose to ignore the historical facts. Suffice it to say, music CDs cost that much because record companies never lowered the prices when they were able to LONG before any of these issues came up. Any piracy then was large-scale organized criminal activity. And had nothing to do with the public at large.

Also in your misguided zeal you mistake my comment, for a justification of, or support for piracy and/or cheating. This is not the case. What I dispute is that piracy is the single driving force behind the high cost of games (and certainly not music), and I stand behind that.

Yes, theft of IP is theft and yes cheaters should be stopped.

But CDs are still the same price they've always been because record companies never lowered the price. full stop. CD duplication and file sharing came long after price cuts were feasible. I will answer your accusation with another one.

It was the greed of record companies which led to file sharing and CD duplication becoming both widespread and acceptable among normally law abiding citizens. Had the record companies lowered their prices when they were able to, I do not believe the culture of file sharing would be as accepted among mainstream society. Now we have a culture where cops, judges, housewives, preachers, teachers, and everyone else readily engage in what, as you correctly point out, is theft. Whats more, they don't feel ashamed or try to hide it from anyone but the RIAA.

Another thing, slightly on a tangent...I find the figures used by the RIAA and others counting every instance of piracy as a lost sale as patently disingenous and odious. Instead of more realistic figures they trot out some numbers out of their accountants wet dreams like these, this makes me even less inclined to have any sympathy for them whatsoever. Like some bad insurance fraud or something...they're reporting damages far in excess of what the actuality is. Its nothing but a baldfaced lie, and they know it, yet they continue to promulgate these 'facts' becasue it suits their purposes.

before the Internet, or file sharing, or CD- R's there were these little things called tapes, funnily enough you could record cd's onto them!!! also a few years later there wer mini discs and quess what ? you could record onto them too!!!

downloading a copy of anything that you havent paid is the same as stealing it from a shop.

Not quite. If you steal a CD from a shop you have physically removed an item of merchandise, the shop is then unable to sell that item and they have made a loss. They have already paid for the item, but can't then make back that money.

If you illegally download a copy of that CD from the Internet, then you have not physically deprived anybody of anything. You have potentially deprived the copyright holder of a sale, but only if you would have bought the CD in the first place.

The difference is like stealing the Mona Lisa or taking a photograph of it. The only problem with this analogy is that with digital music or computer games, the copy is of the same quality as the original.

The issue is, as PreciousRoi pointed out, that the agencies who publish figures of losses due to copyright infringement assume that every infringement is a lost sale. They then price that lost sale at the highest end of the price range for the item copied, including all the distributor and retailer margins, and multiply the two together. They then claim that this figure is what is lost by the industry. This is based on flawed logic, because not everybody who can get something for free would have bought it if it wasn't freely available.

If I offered you a free Ferrari would you accept? Most people would, even if it was just so they could sell the car. However, would you buy one yourself? Probably not. An extreme example I know, but the idea holds, only the proportions of yes answers change with the price of the item.

None of this changes the fact that copyright infringement is illegal, but then it isn't quite theft either, that's why it's legally called "copyright infringement" and not "theft". Copyright theft is a completely different crime and involves removing the right to copy from someone in an illegal way.

OK, tapes...tapes were on the way out, however you have a point, albeit less so than you apparently believe.

Allow me to retort.

At the dawn of the CD age, cassette tapes were indeed the dominant audio media, they had a huge 'installed base', Walkmans, car stereos, dual-tape component units, boomboxes, they were truly ubiquitous. So anyone buying a CD probably has a reasonable 'fair use' excuse to make a cassette copy of the original CD. Most people who made tape copys of CDs did it for just that reason. By the time CDs became popular and began appearing in affordable personal, and car stereo forms, no one cared about tapes anyway. In any event, cassette copies of CDs were much less important later on, when the prices of CDs should have come down.

Funny thing is, you could, of course, buy a retail copy of whatever, but...and this is the fun part...the record labels fought tape piracy by purposefully degrading the quality of retail cassette tapes. One would think that someone plunking down hard-earned lucre for a retail copy would be getting the best possible quality, I mean they have the masters... One would be completely mistaken. Just because we might make a copy, they make sure that any copy we would make is as lousy as possible by ensuring that the original is bad. Pathetically enough, I'm not sure they ever stopped doing this, even after everyone figured out that if you wanted a good cassette you had to tape a CD and use better media. So anyone who did run an organized piracy racket probably had superior product.

Now...MiniDisc...sorry, not a popular enough format here (America), I don't even know anyone with an MD player...I think one year I drooled over one, but never bit. I've met some people with DATs, but they were used for recording live jam bands, usually perfectly legally, and if not technically legal in some isolated cases, not exactly sincerely discouraged either.

So no, I'm gonna have to say that there was a period after cassettes were relvevant, but before CD-R (certainly before CD-Rs became widespread) or mp3, during which there was no economic justification for the continued exorbitant prices of retail audio CDs, aside from unadulterated greed, backed up by a monopoly and worse.

w0rd. I wasn't willing to make the distinction for fear that it would be read as justification.

I mean, I remember seeing some kids on 20/20, or Nightline, back in the PS days coming to school with 128-slot binders filled with copied PS games, apparently to trade or show off? Now you don't really suppose that these kids, rich suburban youths that they were, would actually have bought all those games if they couldn't be copied? However I remember thinking at the time, damn, its not as though these kids can't afford to buy some of those...then I thought, damn, some nerd must have bought his way into a few parties modding those. Cuz these were dumb kids.

Would every person who ever downloaded 'The Humpty Dance' have bought 'Sex Packets'? Probably not, besides 'Gutfest '89' is a bit dated now, but thats the assumption this math is based on.