Microsoft gives up to 1 million Xbox modders the boot from Live
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=6121
Microsoft has announced that it is to cut off access to Xbox Live online services to players running modded Xbox consoles. This move could affect anywhere between 600,000 and 1 million players.

Consoles ... *scoff*

*unplugs the cat5e cable and waits to see what happens...* not that I don't believe Microsoft.... its just they always fail with these ban waves....

Fortunately I saved my original firmware so if IXtreme is detectable Ill just restore it to its original glory, and have to wait till another exploit is found....


EDIT: On the other hand.... this may be a good thing for those hoping to get a few cheap consoles that are banned from live for the other uses, like media players or pure single player campaign's box's for around the house...

Well, supposedly your single-player experience isn't affected. And they ban by MAC address, so restoring your original firmware might not help. Unless MAC spoofing is possible on the 360 ...

Sorry Ill elaborate, I haven't has a Cat5 plugged in since I upgrade to NXE about 2 months ago? So there is no way for me to have been banned yet / or detected unless I was black listed a long time ago and they decided to just wait. So ill leave it unplugged for now, if it turns out they can detect modded firmware, I just have to restore the original then plug back in all's good to go on my console.... the slower people I work with that do play online and pay for their pirate games and flashes may not be so lucky..... of course I wont mind taking that banned xbox off their hands either for £20 lol

Just been quickly reading random stuff, a few theories relate to the use of ABGx which basically parses downloaded ISO's, checks them ect and inserts "stealth" files if needed (had to do this for Brutal Legend)... the theory goes It wouldn't be too hard for MS to get AbgX themselves and ban people using stealth files that matched the ones it uses, assuming that they are different to the ones on the retail disc.

Ah... yeah, you don't want to risk connecting it now I wouldn't think. If they ban your MAC, flashing back to Microsoft-approved firmware won't help.

Best to stay offline until the dust settles.

Well either way he's screwed if putting the original firmware back on before connecting to Live doesn't work, so he may as well try it.



The ban has to do with a check on the firmware upon the connection to Xbox Live, not a list of known mac addresses that have been reported. There's no waiting for "the dust to settle."

Sure, but they're not going to check it every damned time ... once you've been found to be using a bad firmware, your MAC address is banned, so even if you put the original firmware back on and sell it, the new owner is going to still be banned on their Xbox Live account.

I'm well aware of what they do with the blocked mac addresses and how that all goes down. I know that when Microsoft rolls out a firmware update that's mandatory, that I can't connect to Live until I install it. This leads me to believe that the firmware is checked every time, just in the same way that your browser and operating system can be determined by any generic website (although yes, I'm also aware that this information can be spoofed). They're just now rolling out a block on the firmwares they know for sure aren't older versions of their own (versus assuming they're old genuine firmwares and letting them update), and banning those consoles.

Well, the word 'ban' is pretty harsh, and implies that even restoring your firmware won't remove your MAC from their blacklist.

I found Xbox Live to be pretty damned boring anyway. I'd rather just pirate endless games and play through the single-player.

McFly said:

You're right, it won't remove the ban if you restore the firmware after the fact. If you read what I said, if you restore the firmware before connecting you should be okay. If that doesn't work, he can't do anything to get onto Live from now on anyways because he was already marked before even connecting.

Another good reason to buy a PS3 over one. It allows you to do everything, it says so right on the box!

That's true ... but if you do that, what's the point? With your now legit firmware, you're not going to be able to play your pirated games on Xbox Live anyway. Unless you just want to check on the state of you being banned or not.

That would be exactly the point. I thought Shawn was alluding to this, though perhaps not.

It's interesting in any case, that Microsoft is cracking down pretty hard on Xbox pirates, but leaving Windows pirates more or less alone.

Good point, it would be good for MS to find a way quickly to stop W7 pirates....much more beneficial than what they're doing now. Time to move on and not create press articles on it....or maybe that's their plan?

McFly said:

The main thing behind the Live issues stems from things such as action replay and ranking systems of Live games. Back 3-4 years ago when I did absolutely nothing with my life aside from playing Halo 2 on Live, there were so many people cheating through action replay and firmwares that Bungie had to put a whole division on banning people that did this sort of thing (keep in mind, Halo 2 is basically what made Live popular). You couldn't go into a single playlist without your connection being tampered with so you got dropped out of the game, or modded where only the host (randomly chosen unless combined with the connection tampering) had abilities to kill everybody playing at once, repetitively (example in the footnoted YouTube video). Things like this essentially killed enjoyability of Live for non-modders, leading to many not renewing their subscriptions. Microsoft had to do something about this so that Live would retain users, so they started doing this thing they're now doing with 360s to the original Xboxes.

Basically, it's not so much about pirated games as it is tampered versions of the games (or so it started out that way). Also, Windows has hundreds of millions of users, while the Xbox market is much smaller. MS doesn't really care as long as you have their stuff, even if it's pirated. What they care about is losing marketshare, which again, is what modding was doing to the Live 'community.'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDWhzX9TvUY&feature=related

Yeah, that makes sense.

I have read about Microsoft saying things like ... "if you're going to pirate, we want you to pirate our stuff."

Nintendo is trying to do something similar to us home-brewers. Releasing patches that prevent "unauthorized code" from being run from the Wii menu. At least they can't cut our NWFC subscription, because there is no such thing.

Zo noes. Who cares? It's Xbox.

I like to play with my Wii (if you know what I mean )

I don't know what you mean ... please elaborate.

he means his AK-47! He's a f**king soviet comunista!