Microsoft have caused quite a stir this week, banning over 600,000 Xbox Live users for having modded their consoles. The move is an attempt to deter piracy and cheating in online games, two problems that obviously and validly need addressing. But have the bans hurt users with more innocent intentions for their modifications? Read on to find out.

Piracy in the games industry is no new thing; I can remember way back to weekend car boot sales in the early 1990s where dodgy Del Boy types would be selling knocked off Amiga 500 floppies for peanuts. Sales of software for the original PlayStation were marred by piracy-enabling mod chips, and the Dreamcast too was ridiculously easy to exploit, requiring just a boot-disc to play copied games.

Widespread peer-to-peer piracy is rife too, with illegal downloads being cited as a major contributor to ever declining PC software sales.

Despite the might of Microsoft behind it, the Xbox 360 is no better defended against piracy-enabling mods. Specialist services will modify your Xbox 360 for under £100, allowing a user to download and burn their own software. Though Tech Digest does not condone piracy, it is easy to see how strong the temptation of buying cheap knock-off games or downloading them for free could be, especially with games like Modern Warfare 2 commanding an extortionate £54.99 price tag.

Though the gaming industry is becoming increasingly wealthy, piracy costs companies billions of pounds in revenue. While larger publishers may be able to bear the brunt of such losses, small independent companies literally go hungry without legitimate software sales. It results in companies less prepared to go out on a limb and innovate with new creative games, instead focussing on an established series or intellectual property. Cue boring sequels, dire-movie cash-ins and derivative Halo-clones.

Even giants like EA are looking to cut as many as 1,500 jobs in the new year, which will cause a dozen games in the development stages to be canned indefinitely.

However modding does not necessarily equate to piracy.

Here is where the argument gets interesting. Piracy is bad, no question about it. But banning a console modded to increase hard drive space, when the only official alternative is a measly 120GB drive? That can't be fair, right? Microsoft seem very keen to limit the choices available to users to just Bill Gates branded gear; just look at the recent lock-out of third party memory units.

Also, having shelled out for the inflated price of a game, shouldn't a user be allowed to back up their copy? Discs are still a fairly fragile, scratch prone medium. If something so fragile as a disc breaks, should the consumer really have to buy a brand new game? Sure, there is the increasingly available option of legal digital downloads, but, just like with digital music downloads, I think I speak for many people when I say that I like the ritual of walking into a shop, handing over my money and coming home with something physical in my hand.

Modded consoles also open up the Xbox 360 to the homebrew community, with gangs of bedroom designers the world over teaming up to try their hands at game making. This is often a well of creativity and a great entry point for designers with untapped talent. It's easy to forget that massively popular games like Counter Strike started life as software mods themselves.

But perhaps the homebrew community wouldn't seem so vital to creative design if game companies had the money saved from piracy to invest in it themselves. It's a vicious cycle.

Piracy will never go away, but how we deal with it is important not just in terms of punishing cheats and thieves, but also in how we go about protecting consumer rights and defending those who just like to innocently tinker under the bonnet of their favourite toys.

The Ovi Store launched today, promising thousands of applications for a range of Nokia's S40 and S60-based handsets.

What does Nokia need to do to give the Ovi Store the best chance of succeeding? Here are five for starters.

1. Create an easy to use Store

It's inevitable that all mobile application stores are being compared to the one Apple implemented for iPhone users.

There's no denying that the iTunes App Store offers a very slick and integrated system for the user, and Nokia needs to do exactly the same if it's to encourage users to spend and download.

Some early reports suggest that the Ovi Store's current layout is overcomplicated and difficult to navigate. Nokia would do well to make the store as easy to use as possible.

Does the Ovi Store really need a separate app to be installed prior to downloading other apps? If so, Nokia had better make that a seamless process. If not, scrap it and just give direct access to a WAP or web site.

Nokia also needs to make sure that it's easy to pay for apps. Users will always be able to purchase using a registered credit card, but some will also be able to pay via their mobile network provider. I sense complications could arise from this.

Nokia may be thankful that a lot of its users, by nature, won't have experienced other mobile app stores, because at present it's not as good as it could be.

This morning we got some details on the the Sony PSP2, which they now seem to be calling the "PSP Go!". I thought it'd be interesting to compare and contrast it with the Nintendo DSi, which is by far Sony's greatest competition in the handheld market.

Storage

Sony's completely dumping the UMD format, after it's been such a massive flop. The new PSP will instead have plenty of storage onboard - 16GB or 8GB, and let you download content to the device over the air.

The DSi still relies on cartridges, though I suspect that's for backwards compatibility more than anything else. The latest version of the handheld lets you download content over-the-air as well, and you can store the content on an SD card upto 16GB.

Game Catalogue

For the PSP Go! there'll be 100 titles available at launch, including Gran Turismo. Any games you own for your PSP won't work, as the UMD format won't be supported. All DS games are still compatible with the DSi, though there's far fewer titles available in Nintendo's download store.

Controls

While the DSi's much touted touchscreen has proved a bit of a headache for some games developers, others have used it fantastically. There's no word yet on whether the PSP Go! will have a touchscreen but it will have an analog stick, a feature sadly missing from Ninty's handheld.

Size and shape

We don't know how big the PSP Go! will be, yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's rather more compact than the rather chunky original PSP. What we do know is that the slide-out screen will definitely be present.

The DSi, on the other hand, is a svelte 137mm x 74.9mm x 18.9mm and 214g. It folds in half like a book, and can easily be slipped into a coat pocket. Portability is obviously an important factor for these devices.

Release date

The DSi came out on April 3rd 2009 in Europe, and in November 2008 in Japan. The PSP Go! won't be out until the last quarter of 2009, i.e. not before October. It'll be shown off at E3 in June, though, so we should get some pictures of it soon that we can use in place of all the concept art that we've been employing up till now.

Conclusions

The most important things for Sony to get right are the look of the thing, and the game catalogue available. It'd be a good move for them to implement a system where you can get your old games on download when the PSP Go! is released, otherwise I think there'll be a certain amount of consumer backlash.

As for me, though, I'm sticking with my DS Lite. I don't feel the push, just yet, to switch to downloadable games - particularly as backing them up seems to be an issue. When the next generation of devices comes round, I'll be ready.

I bought Guitar Hero on Friday night. I left Shiny Towers the minute I tapped my last key and made a beeline for Oxford Street, home of crowds, that horrible eternally vomiting zombie and one of the few stretches of road still left with more than one movies, games and music shops still standing.

I'd walked past the remains of a credit crunched Zavvi and then up and down between GAME and HMV trying to work out the best deal on guitar packs for either GHIV or Rock Band 2. Which was more expensive was less the issue than which game had the best tracks, after all, it was pay day. Who cares about being broke at the end of the month when you can stay in, turn on and rock out? That's budgeting baby.

So, there I was, on a sunny Friday evening, the first nights of summer in the air; beautiful people in beautiful clothes spilling out of pubs reclaiming the streets, golden light shining through pint glasses - and me, walking past with an oversized box embarrassing one of HMV's larger bags, heading underground and home to lock myself away from the world and screen hard. A little part of me felt guilty but I soon smothered that small voice with a series of rationalisations, and six pack of Carlsberg Export just to make sure.

I can't really give you many more details of the evening itself save the enjoyment of putting together my shiny, new, sunburst strat-like axe, cracking the first tin open and taking it from there. Suffice to say that, by the time I had my first gig under my belt, I was onto can three and on my feet posing at the imaginary crowd in my front room with further affirmation that I do indeed rock.

If you don't play World of Warcraft, or a similar MMORPG, then you might not want to read this. You're going to think it's immensely 'sad'. But there's actually a lot of fun to be had playing World of Warcraft with a significant other, especially if circumstances mean that you're unable to be in the same place on the special day.

Of course, World of Warcraft holds its own "Love is in the Air" event, but we're not just going to limit ourselves to that, oh no. There's a whole world to see, so we'll pick out some of the nicest spots.

Click over the jump to begin the countdown.

My first Twitter update was "Laughing at Katie's birdwatching geekdom" on January 16th 2007, on the CatwalkQueen Twitter. I wasn't an early adopter - Twitter launched in 2006 - but I have racked up a couple of thousand updates since that first one. The only thing that's changed is that I've moved to my own account where my updates are slightly more frequent and a lot more irrelevant.

This week the anti-Twitter brigade have been out in full. Now that celebs like Stephen Fry, Phillip Schofield, Andi Peters and Jonathan Ross are spreading the word away from the geeks and the "social media experts" everyone's jumping on the hate bandwagon. "Twitter is for Twits" read one (predictable) headline in the Telegraph. Congrats to Bryony Gordon (or her sub) for pissing off 6 million people before even starting the article. That's a pretty good move, I bet the page views are through the roof.

I don't really care about privacy. I recognise the fact that other people do, but I don't have anything to hide. Add that to the fact that I'm not especially interesting, and that I've been on the internet so long, and have such a unique name, that there's a lot of me out there already.

That's why I'm not bothered by commenters saying that Latitude is a massive privacy invasion. For me, the social proprioception offered by Latitude far outweighs the downsides of having my location available to my friends.