Do you get banned for any modding? What about watercooling? Someone told me a while ago that its a tag on the inside of the case connected to the motherboard so they know when its been opened, but I doubt this is the case. They probably just query the specs against the specs of a stock 360.

Well i feel that as i have payed full price for my xbox i should be able to do what ever i like to it. And people have a go at others who have their xbox's modded but i don't know about anyone else but i'd rather pay £40 to get it modded and pay a fiver for games. i reckon everyone should get there xbox's modded cuz what the heck can microsoft do their not gonna ban everyone. But there are rumours going around that xbox live will soon shut down. 

To everyone who has their xbox's modded and have been banned i recommand you use Xlink kia it exactly the same as xbox live but FREE! They dont check for modded xboxs or anything.

I find it HILARIOUS of how many people are p*ssed off, pay for it like the rest of us you lazy b*****ds!
Besides, anyone with half of brain would have an extra xbox for the mods...and a live legal one with two different live accounts.....think critically if you want to be a theif. Surely though, don't complain about it when you get caught.

Look, the bottom line is, all you idiots out there that MOD your equipment are the ones that keep raising the cost of games!! You LOVE the games SOOOO much, that you don't have enough RESPECT for the extremely hard work and effort people have put into making these AWESOME games you love, to just PAY for it!! 

Like I said, if you can't afford it, you don't deserve to own it!

~_~

thats how it goes - that's why you have one modded and one non-modded. modded should never hit net.

tho there should be some free replacement when the damn disks wear f****** out ~_~

"A few users claim that they had disconnected their network cables while playing 'backed-up' copies of retail games, but were still switched off."

Now that's just ludicrous and hilarious. Who is stupid enough to go online to play on Live with a modded console? And why don't ThePinQ attack blizzard after recently banning 350,000 cheaters???? I mean, it's not like they bricked the consoles, they just banned them from Live which is entirely their right. But as always here at the PinQ, anything that MS does is turned into hooligan-war. ;)

This is somewhat off topic, but I don't really appreciate Microsoft using the Live signup process to extract an identity-thiefs-wet-dream load of personal information from people.

Seriously, you have to give your date of birth and name (that page says this information may be displayed on screen. What, to everybody?), phone number, and address.

None of this is actually NEEDED by MS to set up a free Silver account, and I certainly don't think it's any of their business. Just more "all your details are belong to us" data collecting by people who don't need it.

Tell you what MS, just stop asking a bunch of stupid questions and I'll buy some of your download games: The money will go into your coffers just the same. If I want a Gold account, I'll buy vouchers for it. You still don't need to know where I live.

Man i'm so mad i did nothing and they still disconnecting me. I'm only 14 and i don't now even now how to do this thing you do with you Xbox 360. All I would like to do is go back on. If any one is having the same problem than contact me at exop90@hotmail.com

It's my xbox, not theirs. Ever since the xbox1 days the choice is simple; offline your box, online theirs.

A no brainer to me... 'CUZ ITS MY BOX !

Fair enough. But then I won't buy a console because I would feel my stomach tighten at paying 30-50% more for every game I can play on my pc. I scratch my head at people who do, clearly they have plenty of disposable income and like to dispose of it.

I just don't get why people buy consoles when all the same games are on the pc for 30--50% less. And your pc can do so much more. It's a lose-lose situation, afaics.

Everyone with eyes and ears who is not in a coma must know what by now and just what Microsoft is like and who they are dealing with. If they hand over their money willingly then they deserve everything they get. If they dont like what Microsft does - heres a little hint - don't buy anything from them. There will always be thieves and robbers - the secret is not to hand the money over to them willingly.

I'll never buy an Xbox. Pretty good chance I'll never buy a Playstation, either.

Here's the thing. I know of two consoles still not banned running iExtreme 1.4 on two different model Hitachi drives, both have played the same recent games which were "backed up" but there are a few things i noticed different than the xbox-scene folks reported being banned

A. no games were ever in the console while a ethernet cable was plugged in, period, no exceptions, this means even after these games were publically available they were not played while "online"

B. no games were played before release date, the thinking being that if an achievement was date tagged before release of the game, even though it was not online at the time, when the achievements were uploaded they would put up a red flag, so this was avoided

and C. none were aquired from Seed4Me, no "review" copies, all retail

from what i see, everyone that got banned did one of the above, either they played a "review" copy, or they played the game online on Live, or they played the game and if nothing else uploaded their achievements before street release date

I can't stand everyone always throwing stupid people under the bus. Would you throw a drink at a stupid person because they deserve it for being slow?

Last I checked, "you can't use our service X ever because you once used competing product Y" is majorly illegal. Get ready for a lawsuit, Microsoft.

I wonder what kind of back doors MS built into their crapbox 360? With that in mind think of XP and especially Vista which was designed with the help of the FEDS. Does the Crapbox still get plauged by the ring of death?

-Ha! So much for the dongles.


Maybe the Darwin awards should have a hacker/pirate category. :+)

What would you do if you were loosing millions and millions of £££'s a year to pirated games.

Saying this is unfair is like saying that massive record companies shouldn't stop pirated music.

It's illegal, don't do it then your 360 will still work.

It's funny how many users get banned, there is a reason for this, if you play a pre release non retail version of course you will get banned... duh.
I know of people that have dodged the Halo 3 ban, and so far the GOW2 ban. 
How?
Well they arent stupid and know that if you play a game a month before its release date, the console and the Vole will see this. 
Thus bringing down the ban hammer.
It reallyall comes down to using you noodle, dont play a beta(pre retail) unless you are a beta tester or developer.
Here is to user stupidity.

Serves them right buy them legit like everyone else does I mean most of the games they have pirated would be cheap pre-owned anyways. I like this idea from MS to be honest probably 1 of the best ways to clamp down on priacy just Nintendo need to do something with there Wii cause everytime they tackle homebrew it just gets cracked again.

Come on, people, it works both ways.
MS releases a console to the wild, and DMCA or not, there WILL be people smart enough to circumvent anti-piracy measures.
However, once these measures are in place, all MS has to do is pirate one of its own consoles in an internal project and see how it works. The DMCA offers pirates no protection, after all.
So they check it out, find a reliable (I hope) metric, and go off on an unplugging spree.
It just means the war has escalated to a higher level. Class action maybe ?
If there is but one guy that got disconnected without modding his XBox, you bet.

Does Microsoft have hardware or software in jet airliners??? Could make for interesting "landings" if they do and something gets changed.

AFAIK, they are banning the users from xbox live, not "clamping down on the hardware that they have actually paid for." It's not like people didn't know this could happen, they just thought if they listen to other know-nothing-know-it-alls on the web, it couldn't happen to them. IMO, it would serve them right if their machines would stop working, but that would be legally dubious, and probably a PR loss for MS.

Microsoft has been snooping on Windows users for decades, is it so suprising they are able to do it so easily on closed hardware. All your bases r belong to microsoft.

Its a pretty well known fact that Live Patches and fixes are on retail games! 
Not everybody has a network connection to update their xbox which is sometimes necessary I suppose.
I am certain Gears 2 has a few patches and obviously "break modded xbox" patch but M$ would obviously not admit to that.

[quote] but Vole seems to be trying to stop software pirates by clamping down on the hardware that they have actually paid for.[/quote]

Seriously, what are they meant to do, clamp down on the software they HAVEN'T paid for??

And anyway, as yet all they are doing is stopping you using live... banning the console from connecting. So no real great shakes, if you'd checked of course...

Further Research of the reading kind, would have revealed the consoles are not switched off , or stopped from working, but barred from connecting to xbox live.



Yeah, sure....Geez! This is really insane. Shutting down customers claiming that they are "pirates" for using a "chinese" modchip that obviously Microsoft claims to be a reverse engineering hack and such.... all of this is so silly and insane... 
People should stop buying Microsoft products forever. It's quite obvious that if the modchip weren't made by Microsoft then they couldn't have had any way to track down those using them, it's obvious that "the hacks" are not true hacks but a controlled type of hacks with "useful" backdoors.. yes, useful to Microsoft to do what is just unlawful and what people should sue Microsoft for. But Microsoft knows that normal people are powerless and they won't sue the giant that no one dares to touch.

Microsoft is SCUM. I hope they fail.