Okay, so i now have four close friends who have been banned from Xbox Live so far. Two of them were banned for playing Borderlands before the release date. The other two were banned for playing poor rips of Madden 10. I'm pretty sure that the dashboard updates have almost nothing to do with it. If you think about it, it takes much effort to do a firmware dump on a drive in windows. Now if you think the dashboard has the ability to do a firmware dump while the cpu is already going through lots of stress playing games, and running all of the components to make the xbox work, then you think the Xbox has a lot more power then it really does. Now i have another friend who has a xbox running ixtreme 16 on it, and he has played the mw2 rip offline, and on another hard drive, he has not been banned yet. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft's so called "Million Dollar Plan", is not really worth a million dollars. My theory of this is that the Xbox's are all made to store information in it, only if a game that was played has any form or style of data corruption. For example, My friend was playing a bad rip of madden 10, or in other words, an "Unstealthed Copy." This information is stored in the Xbox 360, and this information is sent back to Microsoft. Now this feature was not designed mainly for piracy and flashing, but it was created as a diagnostics feature for microsoft, in order for them to receive feedback on games which could have been produced poorly by microsoft themselves. They use this feature now, for that purpose. Now the console will also send back what is corrupt about the game. If it says
Console ID:2398hhh3283
"Game "Left 4 Dead" corruption."
"Missing SS Sector"
Now that was just an example of what the system could do. Now that is almost a 100% give away to MS that you have played a Pirated game. Now for the early release games. Thats a no branner. You played the game early you fuck tard, and on Xbox Live. It might not be corrupted so it wont be stored in your console, but you played it online, your dumb. Now for the actual time peroid of all of this. This Wave of bans occurs becuase MS sends a command to all consoles with connection to XBL, which tells them to send all corruption data no matter if there was any stored or not. MS does this every day to see if any type of corruption was detected by your console. This is why its smart to stay off XBL during Nov. in general. So if you have any type of crruption stored in your console, it can't be sent back to MS.
We already know that unstealthed games can trigger a ban. That's why XDVD Mulleter existed and why abgx360 still exists. We already know that playing early can trigger a ban as people were banned for playing Forza 3 early. There's nothing new in your post really mate.
