Pushed to the Limit?

Piracy. Not a big fan myself. In terms of movies the general lack of quality rarely compares to a cinema visit or a nice official DVD watched on a big screen with lots of extras while in terms of gaming it puts a strain on an industry that's increasing stretched thin.

BXB has always held very strong rules around Piracy and Modding discussion which we enforce to the point of annoying some of our users, but we believe that promoting or condoning piracy is just wrong.

Hence, imagine my shock when a former OXM Journalist and member of the Xbox Community Network started promoting a new site which claims to have hacked the Xbox 360. Luke "The Duke" Newcombe, a self-styled community expert that works for two Xbox Community Network sites including www.news0r.com (a site we've had a problem with before.) and www.totally360.com has recently began promoting a website which conducts illegal Xbox 360 hacking operations called www.devil360.com.

Devil360 has appeared on Engadget and claim that due to the amount of traffic, that their site's server is currently down despite the fact we can still veiw the website.

Newcombe has posted an article on his blog which openly supports the website and says that "a devil will be unleashed upon the Xbox Live community". Newcombe is supported by numerous publishers as well as Microsoft and their Xbox Community Network and condoning illegal piracy not only breaks the law but is also a massive abuse of the trust publishers put in journalists to not encourage activities which are detrimental to the industry.

I've also done a quick screen grab of the blog entry in case the Newcombe decides to try and cover his obviously guilty tracks by editing the entry. It can be seen here

This sort of behaviour really crosses the line and in my opinion can only be resolved by the removal of all support for Mr Newcombe and any publishers that have NDA's signed by this man to alert their legal teams.

It's a real shame that some people don't have respect for those that work so hard in this industry.