Microsoft takes action against members accused of playing pirated copies of games. Microsoft this week booted as many as 1 million players from its Xbox Live gaming service due to the company's belief that they modified their consoles to play games illegally downloaded from file sharing sites. "All consumers should know that piracy is illegal and that modifying their Xbox 360 console to play pirated discs violates the Xbox Live terms of use, will void their warranty, and result in a ban from Xbox Live," Microsoft said in a statement. The move comes amid this week's release of "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2", the mostly highly anticipated Xbox 360 game of the year. So-called warez copies of the game reportedly showed up on pirate sites prior to its release—a development that may have prompted Microsoft to take action, possibly in concert with or at the behest of Infinity Ward, the games publisher. "The health of the video game business depends on customers paying for the genuine products and services they receive from manufacturers, retailers, and the third parties that support them," Microsoft said. Xbox 360 consoles are equipped with Digital Rights Management technologies designed to detect pirated software, but some players have successfully "modded", or modified, their machines to circumvent DRM protections. It was not immediately clear how Microsoft detected the jury rigging. Consoles banned from Xbox Live will still function if games are played offline, but players booted from the Xbox Live service will not be able to sign into their accounts or engage other players over the Internet. A player banned from Xbox Live told the U.K.'s Radio 1 that he was "gutted" and "distraught" by the decision. The player admitted paying an electronics shop more than $100 to modify his Xbox so it could play pirated games. The Xbox Live gaming service counts more than 20 million members, according to Microsoft. Earlier this year, the company extended the Xbox warranty to cover a problem known as "the red ring of death" Source: By Paul McDougall InformationWeek November 11, 2009
They always seem to do it on big release dates, so they catch most people i suppose, and makes the people banned think more probably. MS are just scum, and i am glad i will not buy there 360. Role on the day when ps3 is modded.
I will never buy a 360 anymore, we have 2 xbox 360's with the rings of death. My brother repaired his one like 10 times by replacing new coolers and even that didnt worked out long. Also he overheated it a few times to get it working. I have no a Sony Playstation 3 and i am more happy with that console that a xbox 360 console. The only thing i miss from the 360 on the ps3 are the Halo 3 games. Playstation 3 features: - Bluray player - Online gaming without paying anything (xbox live crap) - No noice player (reading etc) I have read somewhere that if you mod the ps3 the bluray player will die very fast
I am a fan of the xbox 360, when i actually get a chance to sit down and play it......... However, those are 3 very valid points amd i have to admit that i wish in hindsight that i had bought a ps3. Anyway the reason im posting is this........ What i want to know is how did M$ pull this off ? What kind of update or program did they use to detect the drm workaround ?
The Xbox 360 original discs have same security sectors and a video partition in them. MS checks when u play if your disc's security sectors & video partition match with the original disc. If they don't match it means that your discs are pirated so they flag you and then ban your console from Xbox Live. But some people learned how to extract this SS and the video partition from the original discs and managed to make pirated disc appear original.
Wow this is bad I guess we don't have the right to use Fairuse anymore and backup games in case they get scratched cause the idiots at Microsoft designed it so that it was possible for the disc to be damaged if you flipped the system while playing it. As to the PS3 hacking that is going on they are making progress but its really slow cause Sony has more safeguards in place than MS. In order to beat this you would need to put a proxy in place before the internet go to the xbox 360 so that it wouldn't know what the IP address etc is being used back at MS... And I just don't know if that is possible....But this hacking is not illegal its just using are right to back up games and use them....
i really dont understand why people pay for a propietary gaming platform and pay outragously high royalties on every controller, cable, and game while we have the best open source platform for games The PC which is infinititely backwards compatible, and modular, you decide what to play on which resources paying 70dollar for a game for me is like someone having some real problem of perspective a great misunderstanding where is the surprise when they decide that they can treat users even worst well it is not called propietary platform for no reason they are not your xboxes they are THEIR xboxes
Well, if you play games illegally you can be happy if your acc is just banned. Well, I won´t buy any console anyway. PC is simply the best for everything!