Report: Microsoft Re-Activates Banned Xbox 360’s

Via Kotaku:

That’s what internet chatter throughout the course of the evening would have you believe, with reports coming in that banned Xbox 360 consoles (and their associated Gamertags) can suddenly re-connect to Xbox Live.

Users of various forums, including xbox-scene, have over the last few hours found that modified consoles banned from Xbox Live are being allowed back on the service. Sort of.

While we’ve received confirmation that banned consoles are now able to reconnect to Xbox Live, we’ve yet to hear of anybody doing anything more than simply sign in (as in, play online or purchase content), so there’s no word yet on whether these consoles are genuinely “un-banned” or whether they can now simply go one step further than they could previously go before being locked out.

Interestingly, this could mean a couple of things:

1. They’re enabling their updated format very soon, thus rendering old format hacks useless and those devices don’t need the ban anymore.

2. They’re doing some internal testing as a reaction to the recent attacks to PSN and are buffing up their security as a result.

The timing of this report is weird as it coincides with Sony’s admittance of their troubles. The most interesting part of this is what Kotaku said in the end of the article: It’s a trap.