The Seattle Times has reported that Microsoft has cracked down on gamers who make "unauthorized" changes to their Xbox consoles. While the company is not suing individual users, it is kicking them off Xbox Live, a subscription-based service which lets users play other gamers online. A spike in the number of XBox Live ejections occured in the days leading up to the release of Halo 2 in early November, reports the newspaper.
The article says modifications enable players to cheat or play pirated copies of XBox games, although a few have also used the consoles to run on Linux or play music. While Microsoft has no way of monitoring users who fiddle with their consoles offline, once the XBox is connected to the XBox Live servers, the company can determine if mods have been made to the hardware or software (the XBox user license stipulates the right of Microsoft to do this).
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