Examiner

Microsoft released a mandatory update to the Xbox 360 this morning via Xbox LIVE that brings back a boot-up option that was previously taken away.  Unmentioned, however, is that it also appears to be fudging up the works for hackers and pirates.

Officially, the update released this morning gives owners the option to boot straight to a game if you have a game disk in your Xbox 360.  The other option is to boot to the dashboard which has been the defacto standard for a while now.

Unofficially, the updates appears to be blocking hackers and pirates from taking their games online.  Browsing through forums in the hacking community reveals that individuals with modded consoles unable to play popular games on Xbox LIVE like Call of Duty: Black Ops, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Halo: Reach.

Given the recent news about the Playstation 3's security being breached and games like Modern Warfare 2 being overrun with hacks, this is good news for the Xbox 360 community.  The battle between console makers and hackers and pirates seems to be a non-stop effort on both sides.  The next move is for the hackers on the Xbox 360 side of things at least.

Microsoft is also making a small udpate to player's Xbox LIVE Gamercard.  They've sightly changed the look and removed the "gamer zone" but it still holds the same amount of information otherwise.  You can see the new card over at MajorNelson.com.

http://www.examiner.com/console-gaming-in-national/xbox-360-update-brings-back-boot-option-strikes-down-hackers

Also theres likely some behind the scenes improvements and features which they haven't implemented yet. Is this their big update for Q1/Q2 or is it just a little bump in the road?

Anyway we should see a nice spike in the week after nexts hardware numbers, eh?

I was wondering what the hell the update was when I booted up my 360 today!

I just boot up my X360 and the first thing I did is searching for a thread about the update on VG =p.

How come I had the option to boot from disk on startup before this update?

I was under the impression that they do not do the updates like that anymore (spring/fall).

I was wondering the same thing. From what I remember we never lost that feature.

I was just wondering if this was the spring update?

One of the sites I read this story on linked to another forum where they were discussing this and it just cracked me up that all these people were trained to call their pirated games "back up."

It's be glorious when they're banned next week for their "back ups" and they bitch and moan how they got banned for only trying to protect their investment.

That update took forever to download!  Even longer than the NXE and the last update that gave us the new dashboard.  It screwed up my Gamercard, too.  Hopefully that gets fixed.