[deltop]

There's so much anti-ms sentiment out there that any number of bloggers and news sites would jump at the chance to give them a bloody nose if there was was any serious data to back up your allegations.

If a large number of machines were being wrongly banned from Live we'd be hearing about it. Gaming is a mainstream activity now, if so many machines had been banned without cause you'd have many many ordinary people crying fowl and kicking up a fuss. Your average joe in the street here in the uk wouldn't put up with his 360 being blocked unfairly, he'd be straight onto his local trading standards rep.

I'm 33, a former coder who studied CS at university and certainly far far from MS's biggest fan. I'm also from the uk. I just can't see a problem when it comes to the advertising they use here. ANY service you subscribe to always comes with t&c's your expected to follow. Companies have a legal right to enforce these as long as they aren't violating a consumers rights in the process. Trying to insist that ms have no legal right to ban you from Live if you mod your box as per the t&c you agreed to when you signed up would most likely get you laughed out of court. If this isn't the case why haven't we seen any action against them in the many years ms have been doing this? Even if you were right and successfully mounted a campaign aginst them all that would happen is that they'd have to change their advertising a little. You wouldn't see people suddenly back on Live because of an advertising problem! They'd simply be told to simply fix their ads.

Sure if someone HAS been wrongly banned they're entitled to take legal action, no argument here and I'm sure there's a few people who have been wrongly hit with the ban stick. I know that ms have in the past had to unban a number of consoles due to them being wrongly tagged. Taking action against 3rd party memory sticks is very underhand too and in no way do I support that. The reliablity of their consoles is a joke too. But this isn't a "bash ms for whatever reason" thread we're taking specifically about Live and about MS's right to remove people from that service who mod their boxes. They operate a closed system which relies on strict control of all boxes and how they access that sytem. They'll also have companies such as Activision breathing down their necks to ensure that they take piracy seriously and ban machines.