Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Disconnects Modded Xbox Users
S-4'N3 writes "The BBC reports that Microsoft has disconnected approximately 600,000 Xbox users from Xbox Live because the devices they are using have been modified, either with software or with new chips, to play pirated games. 'Microsoft confirmed that it had banned a "small percentage" of the 20 million Xbox Live users worldwide.
Microsoft said that modifying an Xbox 360 console 'violates' the service's 'terms of use' and would result in a player being disconnected.'"
Listen, I hate Microsoft. I think the people who run Microsoft are criminals. I cannot for the life of me believe I'm about to say this:
You buy an XBox 360, you can do whatever you want with it. Mod it to your heart's content.
But the Live network belongs to Microsoft. They have a right to disconnect you if they want.
Now excuse me while I find someone to fulfill my user name.
The great thing about online console play (the only thing, really, that it has over PCs) is their closed nature. It's much, much harder to cheat on a console than on a PC game. Don't get me wrong. I fully support their right to mod their own hardware. But I don't want to play them online.
Which is why so many now mod the controller not the console. It has become very popular to mod the controllers for turbo fire and the like. The reason this sort of thing works is because of the brain dead console development expectations, say it with me "trusting the client is never right".
More games need to enforce maximum rates of fire and the like.
I think it's more funny how people like him think they are entitled to get any number of movies, music, games, etc for free without paying as if they are owed them. Yet, I bet if you asked these same people if it was perfectly okay for their boss to no longer pay them a salary for their work because the boss didn't feel like it, they'd be all up in a tizzy.
That entire first-hand-account is ... annoying.
I was pulling my hair out thinking, 'No, why me?'
That's a question easily answered.
It's like telling someone their dog's just died.
He likes his xbox too much.
I still think they should lower the prices. There are 16-year-old kids out there, they don't earn money so they go screaming to their parents saying, 'Can you buy me this game?'
Their parents should say "No. You buy it yourself. Go earn some money." And why should they lower the prices if people are buying them as it is? I guess normal supply-and-demand isn't good enough for people that don't want to pay for their entertainment. It should be cheaper for the sake of being cheaper...
Fair enough, one game once in a while but the amount of games coming out, good games, everyone wants to play them all.
I would love to have a 100 acre ranch near where I work, too. Unfortunately, they're too expensive.
My favorite quote.
I play with my mates all the time. It's just a good laugh, we all sit there chatting, playing games. Now I don't know what to do.
How about sit there and chat with your mates? Or is playing video games the only thing you and your mates know how to do, and you can't actually have fun without it. *sigh*
Why would they want to sell more 360s? Don't they still lose money on each one? My understanding was that they did, but made it up on the games and such. Buying an extra 360 isn't going to cause a user to buy more copies of the game, so why would they be trying to encourage more 360 sales that cut into their bottom line?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Hum. Out of curiosity, does the slashdot crowd think copying 30-40 games and "saving £600" is good? Wouldn't that actually be considered ... basically stealing? Maybe he couldn't afford £600 of games. I don't feel sorry for him. Not being able to afford something/something being too expensive doesn't mean you should get it illegally (and it's ok, as long as you couldn't afford it).
I don't think it is good. I think it is terrible. It is exactly people like him who are the ones which are giving the corporations the impression that such things are the norm and therefore they feel they need to do something to stop it.
People like that piss me off because it makes my complaints (non-interoperable hardware, laws damaging freedom/privacy, few legal digital options) seem less valid because there always seems to be 'that guy' standing next to you making faces and fart noises while you attempt to engage in rationale discourse.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Did Microsoft really think this through? The people who mod Xboxes are their best customers. They are the enthusiasts who care enough to learn more about the console.
99.9% of them are people who want to play free games, or cheat on games. People who cheat on games ruin the experience for everybody else. Most modded Xboxes were modded by some guy at a games store, anyway, and that guy charged for it, it's not like these guys went through the effort of modding it themselves... they just paid some goon so they could steal games.
The remaining 0.1%, yes, actually just wants to write software for it. Slashdot pretends this group is the larger percentage, but Slashdot is wrong about a good many things.
Comment of the year
You really think so? The "backups" that most people use in their modded XBoxes are backups from some guy on a torrent site who himself probably only rented the game. How are these people their best customers? They probably play more games and have higher gamer scores, and might even pay for XBox Live Gold, but MS still isn't making as much from them as someone who buys only a few games a year.
Cheaters are not their concern (at least, it certainly doesn't seem to be). Microsoft's best customers are not so much the people that buy their consoles - it's the people that buy games for their consoles. The argument here is that people are modding their xboxes to sidestep Microsoft's DRM protection in order to play "backup" games. The people doing this are not particularly interested in creatively modding their xbox so much as being able to (via someone else's creative work) download torrented disc images, burn them to dvd, and play them on their xboxes.
The only problem with this approach is that some (undoubtedly small) percentage of users who are in fact doing creative things by modding their xbox could also fall victim to being a false positive from whatever method Microsoft is using to identify the modders.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
And at least it keeps the cheaters off games.
Not really. All it does is keep the bad cheaters off the games. The good cheaters don't get caught by these sweeps.
And that's just what xbox live needs, darwinism at work refining a better crowd of cheaters.
The checks done by live are less sophisticated than say, punkbuster on the PCs. And all that accomplished was to raise the stakes and make the cheaters go into business selling the "undetectable" cheats and taunting those like Activision.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
'Cause modding hardware you own should be illegal!
No, but violating the terms of use you agreed to buy using their service means they are perfectly justified in banning you from that service when you break the rules.
I've long argued, especially when it comes to games and entertainment related media, there's absolutely NO justification in copyright infringement EVER
When you start dealing with works that are over 100 years old (which we will soon) my outrage scale falls off VERY quickly.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
The people who mod Xboxes are their best customers. They are the enthusiasts who care enough to learn more about the console.
I really cannot see how they are Microsoft's best customers. How does it improve Microsoft's or game publishers revenue when exactly these people almost never buy games. Considering theres no homebrew scene in Xbox360, the sole reason people get their consoles modded is to play copies.
I doubt that this effort will even result in an increase in revenues that will be enough to pay for the enforcement. There must be better ways to improve profitability.
It is not only that for Microsoft. They also have to care for their game developers, who are obviously going to bitch if theres rampant piracy going on and MS isn't doing anything for it. When there's the constant fear that your console could get banned from online play at any time, people begin to think if its just wiser to get the games they like and not bother with it. Unlike PC's, consoles are just supposed to work, and complicating things takes that aspect off. Yeah it wont stop piracy completely, but it will lower it.
First of all let me say that the market for used xbox consoles just got extremely dangerous!
Microsoft needs to set up a system where you can check the status of an xbox console remotely so people can still sell consoles with confidence... 600K Xboxes are about to go up on ebay for a deal that is just too good to pass up.
Secondly if you assume that you do not mind playing games offline that you have pirated, you can still beat the system. Is that not what this is all about?
Step 1: Buy an xbox that has been live banned for very cheap off ebay. It has already been modded, so you dont have to pay for that.
Step 2: Download 50-60 dollar games for free and play them to your hearts content, offline.
After a few games you have already made your money back from the initial purchase of the console.
What if you want to play on xbox live? You have a live console that you do not hack and just enjoy online games there.
You still have to buy games that you want to play online, but there are a lot fewer online games that are worth playing than there are short and sweet single player games that you can just download for free.
Where have I heard this before? http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/11/11/1336200/OS-X-Update-Officially-Kills-Intel-Atom-Support
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
All of that is useless because you agreed to their terms of service when signing up for Live, which also contain terms about just exactly this. You wouldn't get far in court.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. I see a lot of people complaining about DRM and draconian copyright enforcement, which I sympathize with. But it's pretty rare that you'll see someone out-and-out defending piracy here.
Unless it's, you know, cool pirates. Yarr.
Or I dunno, maybe my filter is turned up too high. Maybe I'm just too high. Whatevs.
I don't know how it is where you are living, but a 16 yr old American has quite a few legal employment options.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Mow lawns? Yard work? Do stuff for your parents? I know it's a strikingly new idea to most teens, but your parents don't HAVE to give an "allowance," and I would dare say that some of them may even be willing to pay their children to do jobs that they otherwise have to pay someone else to do... like clean the house if they do maid stuff, or mow/garden/etc if they hire landscapers, etc...
Did Microsoft really think this through? The people who mod Xboxes are their best customers. They are the enthusiasts who care enough to learn more about the console.
Got news for you. The console manufacturers- not just MS- are in this for the money, and enthusiasm for the console doesn't really do that. Matter of fact, they probably don't want people finding out too much about the console anyway, because that opens the way to homebrew and/or piracy, regardless of the intention of the original hackers. (Even if it wasn't used for piracy, MS and its gaming rivals would rather you could only use your console via their official channels, which likely make them more money).
Nothing new here; 25 to 30 years ago, Atari tried to suppress information about their VCS console and 400/800 computers to stop other people making their own games and reducing Atari's slice of the pie. (They did, however, and their efforts beat the heck out of Atari's third-rate offerings).
In short, MS et al don't care about enthusiasm. Their "best customers" are the ones who spend lots of money on games through official channels.
(BTW, though I disagreed with the above comment, I didn't consider it "flamebait".)
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Wouldn't "Dude! this Xbox has a mod-chip so you can play copied games!" be the main selling point of such a console?
Your logic is...staggering. Apparently so as to avoid breeding a "better crowd of cheaters" MS should just lower the bar to such a low level that any old suck can cheat, thereby preventing people from getting really good at it.
I think you should suggest this giant leap of understanding on behalf of mankind to prison administrators. If they keep making it harder and harder to escape from prison, it'll only breed, by "darwinism", a better grade of prison escapees.
Kudos, sir. Kudos.
It's clear this guy isn't interested in going to court, if he's admitting that his recourse would be to commit fraud against a retailer who sells MS products just to get back at MS.
I don't know why he thinks cheating a dealer out of $X of retail product is going to hurt MS in any way at all ... either the dealer is going to eat the loss or his insurance will cover it and his rates will go up. Or maybe he thinks the dealer he buys stuff from is responsible for MS Live's decisions and should eat the cost on their behalf...
1. With XNA there is 0 argument for writing software for your 360. MS has given you all the tools to write/send software to the 360
2. If you have a modded box, MS really doesn't care, what they care about is if you play online and have potential advantages over other players
If you mod, just don't play it online - they can play offline and do whatever they want, just don't play on Live
well that's one way of twisting the issue around, kudos to you too!
Microsoft should ban cheaters, not people with modified clients. Banning modified clients will cause BOTH cheaters and people who do not even want to cheat to defeat the new measures against them. But you're conveniently forgetting about the second group.
Wait, does that mean you're OK with non-cheaters becoming better modders ? My mind boggles...
Then don't buy it.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Apparently some people have gone as far as calling death threats to a "Director of Policy and Enforcement for Xbox LIVE" and his wife (theres also irc logs where he came to say it on #360banned)
Well, maybe he'll think twice before he does it again.
They may not have lost something, but he still isn't entitled to obtain the works of other's for free just because he wants it.
Exactly.
An artist puts on an exhibit and charges an entrance fee (so he can buy food/housing and then create new art). If I sneak in, the artist hasn't lost anything, but that doesn't mean I'm entitled to see it for free just because I want it.
A movie theater plays some new movie. They're going to play it whether I sneak in the back door or not; unless the theater is full, they're not losing money since I only take up one seat. But that doesn't mean I'm entitled to see it for free just because I want it.
(And so on and so forth, as applied to DVDs and streaming video, games and other software, music, pirated satellite/cable tv, hacked cable modems, etc.)
I'll bet money he plays just a few games. Now do your math. It's close to a wash at 75 pounds.
Except that 75 Pounds didnt go towards legally purchasign a game. It went to the person who mod'ed the X-Box. So it's not a wash for MS.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
Or to scare people away from buying used 360s which don't add any revenue to MS. Is the $50 you save worth the risk of being banned from XBL?
I'm using all of my mod points to mod ancient memes down. Please join me.
You really think this kind of thing has an impact towards cheating? I suspect it has a bigger impact on MS's bottom line, as these are people who are paying a monthly fee to play online. Way to go MS, demonstrating part of the RIAA strategy: let's prevent our customers from being able to spend money on us! Way to go!
What this probably kicked off was people who had modchips to play overseas games, and absolutely 0 of the "cheaters".
Oh, and welcome to console DRM at it's finest. You bought into it, now when they kick you out you're pissed that everything they sold you was on a "license" basis and you technically own 0 of it. enjoy!
I would imagine MS would still win that. You're certainly still allowed to keep your account, but you aren't allowed to break the TOS by connecting your modded box to their network. You wouldn't have any problem connecting with an unmodded box that doesn't break the TOS. The service is still supplied; whether or not you can connect to it is really up to you.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Yeah XNA is great for 360. But as it's directly supported by MS, people don't need to mod or hack their 360 to develop homebrew software for it. Which just strengths my point that only reason people mod their 360 is to play pirated copies.
3% is a pretty small percentage.
until that 3% is standing in the street in front of your house with baseball bats. o_O Then tell me that 3% is insignificant.
If we're throwing a wild hypothetical situation like that, then can we also assume the other 97% is standing between the 3% and you, also armed with baseball bats? Or do we only assume one side counts in this matter? (well, yeah, this IS Slashdot and all...)
I mean, in your situation, I suppose you could make an argument that the 97% not affected by this wouldn't care and would just go on cheerfully playing games online on their not-banned XBoxen, and that the 3% are more predisposed to criminal activity such as property damage and murder. I don't have the slightest clue what point you'd be able to make with that in relation to the current discussion, but that's the best I can make out of your argument. Would you care to enlighten us as to why the 3% is what matters?
I have several friends with modded consoles and hand held systems. The only chatter they generally spread is encouragement to mod your own system so you too can download ripped games.
There was nothing "random" or "arbitrary" about banning a select group of members from online services due to the detection (in one fashion or another) of non-standard hardware.
The argument that it stifles innovation or profit is rather flat when taken at face value. For some systems it might make sense, but there are outlets already in place for people that want to develop for the XBox 360. There is a thriving independent developer community out there. Streaming media? There are plenty of ways to get that rolling as well, legitimately.
You just can't rip games is all.
Maybe I've just missed it. Can anyone point to a real life example of something worth modding your system for that doesn't involve torrented games, tv shows, music, movies, etc.
And before someone sidesteps the discussion, no, putting in a larger hard drive doesn't count in the context of this discussion.
It's astounding that comments like this manage to get modded up so high when they contain unverified data. Like everybody else here, I implore you to give us the source of those numbers.
The following is hardly evidence, but merely an anecdote that may be typical of some Xbox users: I have an original xbox. I don't do much online play, but I do own a significant number of games (more than 10), and have played most of them through. After I noticed my Xbox starting to become irrelevant, I picked up a [legitimate] copy of Mech Warrior and soft modded it purely to install Xbox Media Center (now XBMC). Currently, XBMC is the only application that I use with the Xbox. I have never played a pirated Xbox game (on my system or otherwise), and I have never cheated on an Xbox game (on my system or otherwise). I certainly did not mod my Xbox in order to do either of those activities, and I do not plan to ever do those activities in the future. If I did play online and were banned, it would be unjust, unwarranted, and fiscally irresponsible from Microsoft's standpoint in that they would lose out on my monthly revenue. In fact, the main reason that I have refused to use Xbox Live is because of Microsoft's inane policies with regard to modding.
That's a bit different though. People went from downloading illegally to downloading legally because downloading is more convenient than going to the music store and buying a CD, then ripping it to your computer, and the legal download sites allow previews of the songs before you buy. I think modding hardware, downloading DVD ISOs, and then burning the DVDs is less convenient than buying the game, and in some cases, full games can just be downloaded on PSN or XBox Live these days.
There is also no way to rent most music, so it's basically either buy or don't buy. Most games have demos you can download, and if not, most games can be rented for a few dollars a night.
I think the person who downloads an MP3 out of convenience, and someone who goes out of their way to get something for free are two entirely different people. The latter can't really make an argument for convenience or one for "try before you buy."
And that right there is why MS is evil.
You shouldn't have to pay them to put code on your own box.
Now, mind you, I *would* be ok with them only allowing signed games to get onto XBL. They could very easily do that without outright refusing to run the games at all though.
Unfortunately, telling a pirated game apart from a homebrew game is not easy, and it's clearly in in MS's business interest to treat them both the same.
All of that is useless because you agreed to their terms of service when signing up for Live, which also contain terms about just exactly this. You might get far in court.
While a TOS is more valid than an EULA he may be able to win in court depending on the circumstances.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Dude, it's a fucking typo and Slashdot has no Edit option. Of course it's supposed to be "device", congratulations, you win. My typo is no excuse for the morons on this board who have no reading comprehension skills, but feel compelled to "correct" me anyway.
So my measured and intelligence response to you is, "go fuck a goat." Thank you.
Comment of the year
Its not even cheaters since there's no modding titles - no one has cracked the signed code on the discs, so its purely to stop "backups". I'll give people the benefit of the doubt, and it would be slightly more convenient to not load the disc in the machine even when its already on the harddrive through the "load to disc" feature. But if anyone seriously thinks these folks aren't ripping games, you gotta be kidding yourself.
You're allowed to mod your hardware. You're just not allowed to use modded hardware on their service, it says so in the contract you agreed to while using their service.
If you don't like it, don't buy it.
Have a nice day.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Those music studies only prove that 10% of those that download music, spend more than all the people that don't download.
This is blinging
I totally agree. Some people feel they're entitled to everything for free. It's not just games, though - software like Photoshop, Premier or Maya get pirated a lot.
What's really sad is, most successful people never paid for their copies until they actually needed them for a legit business. College students will pirate that stuff to learn the software and be able to put it on a resume, ultimately making money off it - but according to most of them, it's totally moral only paying for software once the first(or tenth) paycheck comes in.
I admit I'm a pirate scumbag, but I don't pirate software or games. I do try games, which classifies me as a pirate scumbag, but I don't have a single piece of unlicensed software on any of my computers. Try it(regardless of whether it's shareware), make a decision, then buy it or turf it.
Most pirates are just in denial - They're getting training with software that should cost them thousands, putting them ahead of non-pirates. I don't know how you can get rid of that incorrect feeling of entitlement. I know it bleeds through to everything they consider purchasing.
I myself have tried to keep my sense of entitlement in check. For example, I paid $37 for FRAPS, and thought it was a good deal. I paid $10 for Mass Effect (DRM laden, eeeeww!), and that was the most I was willing to pay. I paid $20 for Torchlight, and $30 for King's Bounty, and both were good deals. I'm not entitled to stuff for free, even if I demand the right to try software that lacks a refund policy.
You don't HAVE TO PAY to put code on your own box. You just have to pay if you want that code to interact with Microsoft's servers.
If you don't want to play on XBox live you can do whatever the hell you want to your Xbox. Just don't try and connect to Microsoft's servers. It's very simple. It's not really nefarious.
Non-sense. ToS clearly states clearly they don't allow unauthorized modifications. You're not allowed to mod your xbox, period.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
When I was a teen (not too long ago, I'm only 22 as of writing this), I couldn't afford every game I wanted. You know what I did? Went down to Blockbuster and paid a couple bucks to hire it. Sometimes I was lucky, and one of my friends owned a game I wanted, and would let me borrow it. A few times, we would even plan so we each got different games, so we could trade them when done. Now, I have a younger brother (13yo) who burns every PS2 and XBox game he can. I'd bet the farm the majority of these haven't seen more than a couple of hours of playtime. They have absolutely no value to him. I asked him how many games he's beaten, start to finish, and the closest he could think of was 'unlocked all the characters in arcade mode on Tekken'.
--sherman42
With the abundance of the red ring of death syndrome it's rather sketchy to buy a used xbox 360 already.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
As someone who modded their xbox (not my 360 which remains unmodded). No one with a modded xbox buys game, they download them. The notation that its for backup is silly. There are 2 people out of every 10,000 that use it for backup. I'm not against it being done, I'm all for people being able to back up their games since its a pain in the ass to get replacement disks in most cases,
Its just silly to pretend that the majority of modders buy games, they don't. I know plenty of people who specifically did not want their XBox modded because they would just download games for free.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
When a company wants to increase its revenue they will initiate a ban. The pay method of the individual is never banned. The company will no longer have to provided the service that the end user payed up front for. It is then predictable that a high percentage of users that were banned will immediately repurchase it.
600,000 Gold accounts are worth how much?
Arbitray:
600,000 x $27.50 USD (3 months) = $16,500,000.00
AVG user is on day 10 of 90 day prepaid Gold Service
Ban-Hammer is dropped
M$ just made 14,850,000 pure profit by not having to honor remaining service
Follow week after the Ban-Hammer 50% of users repurchase Gold accounts $8,250,000.00 of new cash surge
If M$ or any company for that matter wanted to curtail cheaters and modders, they would ban your Credit Card (pay method).
The worst part of this tho..
Games used to allow local lan play, most don't anymore... It basically killed the idea of a LAN party. You have to connect to live, just to play a game with someone sat next to you.
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