Folks in Bulgaria won’t have to worry about being assigned the cellphone number 0888 888 888. Every single person who’s ever had that number was killed under suspicious circumstances. Cellphone provider Mobitel has permanently banned the number.

In other Bulgaria news, the government has recently banned the numbers 666. The new number of the beast will be 667. Make a note of it.

If you are one of the million or so Xbox Live users who were banned from the service, things aren’t as bad as we thought. Some modders are working on a solution that will revert the firmware to a state that is nearly the same as the stock firmware. Hopefully the end result means that you’ll be able to use your console again and not have to buy a new one.

Right now two fixes are being worked on: the iXtremeLT and one from Xbox-Scene. The first isn’t ready yet, and the latter works, but you should be aware, it is very complex.

Until recently Xbox 360 owners were able to download a firmware hack which allowed them to play backed-up games and essentially boot-legged copies of games on their game console. They were also able to participate with them on Xbox Live seemingly without any notice from Microsoft, but that appears to have changed.

Apparently with the recent Spring Update earlier this month and coinciding with the beta release of Halo 3, Microsoft has shown that they are able to detect and ban those consoles with modified firmware. When consoles with the modified firmware is detected users will receive an error code (Status Code: Z: 8015 – 190D). As a result, Microsoft is permanently banning modified console from the Xbox Live service, but they are not banning the individual user account. When trying to connect through the modified …