QUOTE(Iriez @ Nov 23 2007, 02:22 PM)
I know dozens of people with the same information. All are not banned, yet only play that specific game/release.
Its difficult to find a pattern if any. Thats why MS is smart in using 'waves' to ban people. There are also people who do not play cod4 at all and are banned.
The checks are the same as before, just that MS is getting tighter in their validation methods with regards to SS/DMI/PFI matching.
Quite true. At least two of the more recent "releases" needed fixes, so I'm sure COD4 is not the ONLY culprit, and there may have simply been a timed check of the game, a procedure sent downstream when the game "checks in" to Live. The "waves" thing is indeed a smart tactic, and everybody needs to keep in mind that they are using this tactic - your ban has little to do with what you are doing at the time of the ban, and not getting banned for some is a big "YET", not a sure thing.
It is most likely that your Xbox 360 gets "tagged" by the server at one point in time, followed by a ban at a later point in time. This is done to create disinformation in the ranks fo the underground, and obfuscate the real trigger. The first thing that needs to be established is if Microsoft found a way to detect hacked firmware directly, or if they are using an indirect method.
As I stated last time this happened (The "First Wave"), bannings of people using MS28 drives pretty much precludes direct detection, since Firmguard prevents accessing the firmware on a normal Xbox 360 - it's essentially a black box. It was subsequently determined that Microsoft was accessing the game discs in such a way that revealed, indirectly, that the firmware was hacked, and the game disc was not original.
Primarily, "Round 1" exploited non-stealthed discs, and a quirk in the Hitachi firmware that gave up the special sectors in one big "fetch" that should have not worked (a bug that exploited both the quirk in the firmware and the unique sector layout of the backups). Since then, we've gotten the iXtreme firmwares, which protect against much of this.
The missing piece, however, is that backups cannot be perfectly validated without a database of some sort to insure they are "perfect" data copies of the originals, at least as far as anyone accessing it through a hacked drive can tell... as I stated in a previous post, no firmware can validate this, because it would require a large database that gets updated with new releases, and there's no practical way of doing this in firmware (and firmware cannot access the internet, so an online database is not possible).
Lately, the release groups seem to be incredibly inept. If they can't do the job right, they should stop doing it altogether, because it seems like every other release is NOT a data perfect copy of the original. It might be that Microsoft planted these bad releases themselves or it might just be that the moron making the backup is incapable of drooling without his mother's help. Whatever the case, if you need to backup your games, use your Xbox 360's drive to do it, or get a Kreon (with a couple more models added, there's no reason not to have one). Microsoft knows what the correct data CRCs are, they can easily use signed code downloaded to your system to check it against the disc you are running, and only your diligence and care can prevent Microsoft from detecting you.
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Topic: Official Xbl Ban Thread (Read 605 times)