Break out your pens my freedom loving friends and write your senator. It seems that it is illegal for me to modify a piece of hardware that I own. That’s right, today the USDOJ siezed control of isonews.com. The owner had been selling mod chips that allow people to play any game on their XBox. The DOJ has a press release online about the whole thing.
Here is what bugs me about this. I don’t own an X-Box, and we’ll skip the part about how I think people who own an X-Box should be thrown in jail. That aside, this is a lot like making a VCR illegal as that allows you to play any movie over and over again without renting it again. But it also has legitimate purposes. The Enigmah mod-chips he was selling allowed you to play back ups and any region DVDs. This is hardly illegal. I’ve got a few old CDRom games for PC that are all scratched up and no longer playable, if I had been really worried, I could have burned copies of them. Pretty straight forward. But apparently, giving people the ability to do that is now illegal.