Wires Crossed #23 – February 4

Autistic Boy Branded Cheat

Autistic Boy Branded Cheat
An American boy with autism has allegedly been branded a cheat by Microsoft after garnering impossibly high scores while on Xbox Live. According to Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft’s director of policy and enforcement, he has “confirmed the achievements were illegitimately modified” and that the boy can earn back his achievements in the proper manner. However, there has been no explanation of how the account was tampered with, or how the company knew it had taken place. The boy’s mother is so far refusing to back down on the issue. While autism can be debilitating, there are numerous examples of that afflicted by the disease with incredible abilities. Maybe this kid fell into that category.

Wii Gives Perfect Score
John Bates is a world record holder at the ripe old age of 85. Bates, from Onalaska, Wisconsin, has set a Guinness World Record bowling 2,850 perfect games on his Wii console. The keen gamer bowls both left and right handed, and when he reached 2,100 perfect games he called the London-based Guinness World Records who sent a representative out to confirm the record. Here at Wires Crossed, we didn’t realise Guinness kept such records, but we’re wondering what they would think of the record scores achieved on Call of Duty: Black Ops zombies….

Paper Glider Wins $10,000 iTunes
A mother from Kent, England, has won a $10,000 iTunes card after downloading the 10 billionth app from Apple’s online store. Gail Davis says her daughters downloaded the Paper Glide game, so you would hope that mum will be sharing the prize with them. It has taken consumers 2.5 years to download the 10 billionth applications, with seven billion of them coming about in the past 12 months. As you would expect, Apple are over the moon about it, as, no doubt, are the developers.

PS3 Hacker Restrained
Hacker George Hotz has been has had a restraining order put on his website and must turn over his equipment to CE giant Sony, in a decision handed down by US district court judge San Francisco. Hotz gained notoriety last year when it was alleged he managed to hack into his PS3, which allowed the unit to enable uses to play pirated games. While you can certainly put this latest development in the ‘win’ column for Sony, you have to question whether it really matters as the information can be obtained by a simple Google search on the Internet.