Xbox Live’s Larry Hr yb (aka Major Nelson) has just announced via his blog that the Xbox 360 will be receiving a new system update today, with Microsoft pushing out the update in the early hours of the morning. Major Nelson says that the update is simply for “general system maintenance” and emphasises that there will be no new features coming to the console in this update, meaning that it is not an early release of the anticipated Metro-dashboard refresh rumoured to be released on November 25.
This update is most likely preparing the console for the upcoming major dashboard update, and as 1337 Mods reports, new security and anti-piracy measures are most likely coming to the console following the development of security circumvention methods. “iXtreme LT 2.0+” was recently released by hacker “C4eva”, which bypasses security measures and allows pirated copies of the large-capacity XGD3 game discs to run with a modified console. No doubt Microsoft has introduced something to catch and possibly permanently ban these consoles from the Xbox LIVE service, as has happened in the past.
The next major update that is said to be coming to the Xbox 360 is the Fall 2011 dashboard revision. This will bring many major changes, including an updated Metro-style interface with better Kinect support, Bing and Youtube support, Beacons and cloud storage for LIVE profiles and game saves. The recently announced Xbox LIVE TV service will also be bundled with this major revision, rumoured for a release on “Black Friday” (November 25).