Microsoft’s ongoing crackdown on pirates and modded Xbox 360s is said to have resulted in 600,000 Xbox Live accounts being banned from North America alone, with more to follow…
The “disturbing truth” runs thus:
A conversation with a friend who works for a call center that handles an Xbox 360 account has yielded a disturbing truth: Microsoft has started its annual Xbox Live banning spree and it has disabled 600,000 accounts so far in the US and Canada.
The target of the banning spree are mainly people who have modified their consoles to play pirated games. My trusty source says that they have been given instructions to push for a million banned accounts by the time the holidays are over.
Leaving aside the question of the reliability of this “trusty source,” it is obvious Microsoft has banned a very large number of Xboxes, and an even larger number of Xbox Live accounts.
Such is the ire of these unhappy pirates that the man in charge of Xbox Live has been subjected to the usual deluge of Internet harassment, with him reporting death threats against himself, his family and even his dogs, along with threatening calls throughout the night.
For those interested, the chat logs of his (genuine) appearance on IRC to beg/threaten his stalkers into stopping are visible below:
The threats relented after he mentioned they were being reported to police – with the bans evidently proving quite effective, it seems the Xbox 360’s noisy pirate community is proving quite the pushover so far.
Via Hachimaki.
Microsoft caught them off guard
Microsoft : HAH F*CKING OWNED!!!
MS Pirates: oh, it’s ON NOW!
Truth behold, the ps3 is the better console for now….
may i know who is the artist of the cover picture, and which series are the characters from? they look familiar, but i can’t place them…
Why is everybody crying about being banned?. We all knew this was coming and the risks involved, so just do what most people including myself are going to do and buy a console for legit online play and use the banned modded one for offline play. Simples
@ Char
The Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act does not apply. The purpose of the Act is to make warranties on consumer products more readily understood and enforceable.
Remember the terms of service that you agreed to (but probably never read) when you first connected to Xbox live?
You can thank the Magnuson-Moss Act for that one. If, like most people, you never bothered to read it and didn’t realize that consequences of modding your Xbox is actually stated there, then tough luck.
And yes, it’s very disheartening to hear a lot of people suddenly becoming “legal experts”, and imply the limited knowledge they know of the law is better and can suddenly replace years of law school by highly paid M$ lawyers.
And for that matter, I won’t be surprised if somebody DOES seek legal action for the banning, and have the case thrown out faster than you can say, “Red Ring of Death”.
And by the way, and if you’re referring to the Wikipedia excerpt that states:
“Warrantors cannot require that only branded parts be used with the product in order to retain the warranty.This is commonly referred to as the ‘tie-in sales’ provisions, and is frequently mentioned in the context of third-party computer parts, such as memory and hard drives.”
It won’t do any good.
A careful reading of the actual Act found in the FTC website (and not just the Wikipedia article) gives an example of a permissible provision:
“Improper or incorrectly performed maintenance or repair voids this warranty.”
Good luck trying to explain to the courts that your console was properly ‘repaired/modded’.