All 360's have a built in kill switch!?

1st. Interesting Thing:
There is a super secret kill-switch remote suicide self-destruct command that if Microsoft really wanted to they can remotely trigger and tell an Xbox 360 to fry itself and die. This was intended to be a last resort option if a fight against Xbox Live cheaters or major league professional game piracy ever got big. To their knowledge it has only been done in test situation in the lab but if they wanted to they could have the regular system security sweeps over Xbox Live activate a kill command when it found a compromised hacked Xbox 360 system. It works by having the Xbox overload an efuse and "pop" the efuse. The Xbox 360 will then crash and then will get an "Red Ring of Death Core Digital" error when the boot-up test comes back with a major component hardware failure. This is not the same as bricking or crashing a system since this will actually do physical damage to the motherboard.

It is not technically illegal for them to do this since attempting to hack an Xbox 360 is a violation of the Xbox Live Terms of Service EULA and a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Microsoft's entire business model on the Xbox is based around them loosing money on the cost of the hardware and then to make it up from game publishing royalties. If game software ever got easy enough for mainstream consumers to try it would nuke all chances of the Xbox 360 business being profitable. Likewise the entire idea behind online gameplay on the Xbox Live network is that it is a secured walled garden that is impenetrable to hacking and cheating. If there was rampant cheating it would cause people to loose faith in the network service and not want to keep subscribing to it. This is Microsoft's "nuclear" option. Currently they have not had to show this trump card since they can ban consoles and users from the Xbox Live network but if it ever really got out of hand they have the option of pulling the trigger and causing and Xbox 360 to melt down and kill itself via software. A "popped" Xbox 360 is not really a fire hazard since the BIOS will shut down the CPU and GPU after the boot test fails and the only thing that remains powered is the Red Ring of Death after the hardware failure mode is triggered. Now if you send a "popped" Ex-Xbox to a RnR repair facility they will have no problem recognizing the "popped" fuse and they will not offer to repair your Xbox 360 since they know that you were an naughty boy and they had to kill your Xbox.

Besides considering the fault intolerant design of the Xbox 360 hardware it is not too hard to get them to break. They will never ever admit to this but if they wanted to they could kill and Xbox just by running a self-destruct command over Xbox Live. Think about that the next time you harass a woman and tell her to show you her boobs over Xbox Live. Again Microsoft will never admit this but the back door kill-switch was built into the Xbox 360 system.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/digitaljoystick/archives/168594.asp

Wow, if true I wonder how hard it would be for a hacker to tell a couple million consoles to go fry themselves?