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Banned Xboxs flood online marketplaces via BBG.
Hundreds of Xboxs have appeared on online marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist in the wake of the mass Xbox live bans. Over the past week Microsoft has banned nearly one million users from the online gaming service after finding that they had modified their consoles to play pirated games. Since the ban is connected to the console rather than a gamer's online account, many modified Xboxs have appeared online being sold by banned users. eBay has issued a warning to users on its website to be wary of buying consoles in the wake of Microsoft's move. In a post on the website's guide section, it said: 'If you are looking to buy an Xbox 360 on eBay in the near future, ask the seller if it has been banned from Xbox Live and be sure to pay by PayPal in case they lie. If you do get a banned console, start a PayPal claim.'Microsoft has said that all bans are permanent to the console and no affected units will be permitted back onto Xbox Live on any account.
You can get a banned console for $40 now. I know that a lot of Microsoft folks read MAKE so please Microsoft folks, figure out something else besides permanently crippling millions of devices. Sure they can be used to play offline, but I doubt the owners will keep them, so it's one stop to trashville. They'll end up in a landfill, at least offer a way to re-active them or something, anything.
It's amazing what greed will do to companies and people alike...
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I bet MAKE readers can come up with plenty of uses to keep these from the trash. Render farm, Beowulf cluster...
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You can contact Microsoft and get a banned machine "reactivated" on another Live account. The article is incorrect.
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Really? when you call xbox support they expressly say there is no way a rep can unban an xbox for you. if your account gets banned, you can get another live account, but if your console gets banned, you need a new console.
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We were in Toys R Us last weekend and my wife was teetering on buying a Xbox elite or PS3. The sales people were very honest and warned us that if we buy an Xbox MS can Brick it at any time with their 'infallible' identification technique. I know how well MS does the infallible thing. I doubt we will ever see an xbox 360 in our house.
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You hook one of these up to an external mp3 drive and you have an instant party machine with great visuals.
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they are still computers, what to stop you from utilizing some seriously cheap processing power. we cannibalized my friends first xbox when it died. lol I've got one of the 80mm fans 2part epoxied and modded to use as a new video card fan. the harddrive is floating somewhere in one of our computers, the ram was upfor grabs. not sure what the processor and video card are like in the new systems but probably better my my 9800 pro.
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Seeing as this is MAKE blog, a blog of hackers, tinkerers and what not, isn't this kind of to our advantage? I'm not much of a gamer, but the opportunity to buy an xbox360 for just $40 seems great, and significantly lowers the prohibitive cost of hacking one of these.
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It really can be deceiving :
My 360 fried last year and MS wasn't willing to take it under warranty (i was so pissed i gave up). I figured that i could buy one of those banned 360 to finish the games i own. When i inserted one of them, the console asked to update to a newer system version, that you can only make when you are connected to xboxlive...
That's it, i'm buying a PS3 (and i sworn i will never do that out of rage for that MS piece of crap).
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