Microsoft Unbans ALL Banned 360s

[Rhyme]

"Earlier this morning, on April 26th, Microsoft unbanned every single console that has ever been banned from Xbox Live. It is uncertain if Microsoft has a backup of all the banned consoles but as for now, there are no signs of the consoles being rebanned. With the unbanning of all the KV's this means all your Jtags will be unbanned as well, however booting them will still result in a near instant ban!

It would be clever if Microsoft did this to inspire the people deprived of PS3 to reuse the server, however this seems more like a human error. Regardless of the situation, someone is going to be in a lot of trouble for this one!"

some people are speculating this is because of the new dashboard supposedly stopping piracy entirely (and they seem very confident in it), some people are saying it's because Anonymous threatened them (highly doubt this, they've ignored all previous threats like this)..

i'd assume it's because the new dash is going to stop piracy, theres no reason to keep those consoles banned for flashing banned..

just thought i'd post this.

[Vipershark]

piracy can never be stopped
we have physical access to the console
with enough time and resources, it'll be broken.

[Rosencrantz]

This PSN shit is getting crazy, what with all the account information that was stolen.

I am not surprised that if Microsoft was threatened by this, they'd comply instantly with any of these demands. Since, you know, you -kinda- need credit card information to run a consistent LIVE service. And if PSN was cracked, who's to say that Microsoft won't be victim to attack as well? And if MS was attacked, then all of those credit card numbers? All that personal information? All get stolen, just like that.

[Omegajak]

I watch/ed a lot of Ranma 1/2 everytime I see stories about this Akane Tendo's voice just echoes through my mind with the title of it.

Akane: "Hacker's and Crackers! The inside job part 1"

"Hacker's and Crackers! The Inside job part 2"

"Farewell my sweet PSN!"

"Return of the dead! The case of the unbanned 360!?!?"

Honestly, all of this just makes me play my single player games harder. It sucks though that such an extreme thing had to be done for Systems to be questioned.

[Lemonray]

I think my cousin was banned a while ago, so I suppose he'll be pleased to hear this.

I wouldn't be at all suprised if this was intentional.

[Sorario]

haha wow

this whole psn thing really is playing out amazingly

[Alpha Six]

I am seriously disgusted by this generation. This Playstation/360 rivalry shit is out of control.

[Chutzpar]

Not sure how I feel about this. I'm obviously absolutely fine with Microsoft taking precautions to try to keep their customers safe, but with the "Hey your PSN might be hacked but you can still play XBox!" recently it seems more like they're going for oneupmanship instead.
That's just kind of childish.

It's cringe-worthy enough when fans start acting like the console you play matters worth a damn, once the companies themselves get involved it's straight-up ridiculous.

[Shadowth117]

While I don't think Microsoft needed to go so far as to publicly point out that they're doing better than Sony at the moment, I gotta say that even if its superficial I feel a lot more secure playing Xbox 360 than PS3 online. I can't say too much about it since I haven't played online on PSN so much, but knowing that its not nearly as easy to mod a game and play it online just to piss people off with your infinite health and instakill weapons is always nice for me. Hell I know that's possible to do that online on 360, but I certainly don't see it a lot. Like I said, can't say I know for sure about PSN, but I DO know its far easier to set up with PS3.

Regardless I'd attribute this tight lockdown on LIVE stuff, while a little ridiculous to the point of POing developers at times, to the reason I'm not ever hearing about problems like this with LIVE. Be that as it may, if Microsoft ever screws up like this with THEIR security I'd be just as bothered by them.

[Alpha Six]

but I DO know its far easier to set up with PS3.

What? No it isn't. Modern Warfare 2 wasn't hacked until like, years after its release. MW2 on 360 was hacked almost immediately. 360 games are hacked WAY more than PS3 games.

[Shadowth117]

but I DO know its far easier to set up with PS3.

What? No it isn't. Modern Warfare 2 wasn't hacked until like, years after its release. MW2 on 360 was hacked almost immediately. 360 games are hacked WAY more than PS3 games.

I'm just saying at the moment its far easier to get a completely modified game to run on the PS3. Unless something big has changed recently you have to go through the effort of burning a new disc and doing that correctly whenever you want to run a modded game on the PS3 online since you can't run a JTAG online (As far as I know) without getting banned soon after. Because of that, you'd have to use a modded 360 disc drive to read the games and that has to be updated a lot which can be quite a pain to keep current games working online and you have to deal with MS's LIVE updates everytime so that you could even play online at all. Because you had to deal with these updates that added extra protection as well, it made things much harder.

With PS3, you'd just slap the game on your hard drive, mess with what you like, and use the latest PSN exploit to sign in and do what you want. You can literally modify the game off your hard drive and run it. While admittedly this is possible on the Xbox 360, you'd need to JTAG it which not only is a bitch to do now with a lack of consoles that can actually still do this since they require you to have a console that has only had a few of the updates after NXE at the very most or you're out of luck, but as I said tend to get banned very fast if you can even get them online.

So yes, even before this PSN trouble started I was more worried about hackers on the PS3 than the Xbox 360.

Edit: Also, before its brought up I'd like to point out while savegame modding hasn't been happening for as long on the PS3, 360 DLC/XBLA content still isn't publicly or maybe even privately moddable online. PS3 DLC/PSN content has been like this for a while now.

[Alpha Six]

But piracy isn't the subject. If we're going on piracy, Wii is doing worse than both consoles put together. You brought up game hacks like god mode and instant killing, which rarely happens on any game on PSN, and is marginally more rampant on the 360.

And apparently nobody remembers XBOX Live going down for 2 weeks in 2007/2008 during the holiday season?

Obviously Live's downtime wasn't as severe as what's going on with PSN right now, but still. Neither console is perfect, nor is either one safer than the other. You're automatically at risk when you put your personal information on any console.

[Shadowth117]

But piracy isn't the subject. If we're going on piracy, Wii is doing worse than both consoles put together. You brought up game hacks like god mode and instant killing, which rarely happens on any game on PSN, and is marginally more rampant on the 360.

And apparently nobody remembers XBOX Live going down for 2 weeks in 2007/2008 during the holiday season?

Obviously Live's downtime wasn't as severe as what's going on with PSN right now, but still. Neither console is perfect, nor is either one safer than the other. You're automatically at risk when you put your personal information on any console.

I'm not really arguing that you aren't at risk whenever you go online anywhere with personal information, but you've got to admit that some places are definitely more secure than others with that kinda stuff. I just personally think that Microsoft is a bit more together with that stuff than Sony in general and I've said why for the consoles at least.

As for piracy, I wasn't intentionally mentioning that, but it kind of has to be mentioned since heavy game modding often involves the same techniques since with both methods you're running something you weren't meant to run on your console. I wholeheartedly agree that the Wii is the worst with this though with the Wii in particular I've see a lot of very interesting mods that are pretty awesome. I've also seen crap like the wall hacks in the COD games that people use because they can't win otherwise. You get good and bad with that openness.

[DioShiba]

I'm not really arguing that you aren't at risk whenever you go online anywhere with personal information, but you've got to admit that some places are definitely more secure than others with that kinda stuff. I just personally think that Microsoft is a bit more together with that stuff than Sony in general and I've said why for the consoles at least.

That doesn't change the fact you are at risk when you put your information online as a whole, this isn't necessarily just consoles alone. And that doesn't matter if it's secure, even if microsoft is good with keeping their shit it doesn't mean they can't get hacked.

Back to the main subject, microsoft is really milking the whole situation. to earn more cash. I'm pretty sure it's already been said but this generation's console wars is by far the worst, and to be perfectly honest I won't be surprised if there is another crash in the market if it's because of it.

[Negative-Zer0]

And I thought Nintendo vs Sega was bad.

That was friendly competition. This is what happens when 2 companies not for lack of a better term devoted to gaming enter the console market.