On November 15th, 2001, Microsoft released the original Xbox, in the process, it changed the console landscape forever. Twenty years later, the company plans to celebrate the birthday of its first-ever home system by putting out a handful of translucent accessories, including the Xbox Series X/S controller you see above.

According to Microsoft, the translucent design is a reference to the see-through controllers it shipped with the original Xbox debug kit — though I imagine for most people it’s more likely to remind them of the N64’s iconic Atomic Purple controller, and that’s a good thing. A nifty touch here is that Microsoft made the internal components silver to make them easier to see. The brand’s signature green color is used for accent details, including the rear grips. Outside of those visual flourishes, it’s functionally the same as any other Xbox Wireless controller you can buy from Microsoft. Expect Bluetooth for PC and mobile pairing, support for button mapping and a better d-pad than found on controllers from past Xbox generations. 

Microsoft

You can pre-order the 20th Anniversary Special Edition controller for $69.99 starting today through the Microsoft Store. Come November 15th, it will also be available through various retailers. If you can’t justify adding another controller to your collection, Microsoft also plans to release a 20th Anniversary Special Edition Stereo Headset that will retail for $69.99. Unfortunately, it doesn’t lean into the translucent aesthetic quite as much as its counterpart but still looks like it would be a decent showpiece.

Google Maps has included cycling directions for years now, but not a dedicated navigation mode for those who like to travel from place to place on two wheels. That’s changing in the coming months with the introduction of a feature called lite navigation. Taking the turn-by-turn functionality that Maps is known for, the tool allows you to see important details about your current trip without the need to keep your phone’s screen turned on. You also don’t need to enter the full turn-by-turn interface to use the feature. At a glance, it will also allow you to see your current ETA and any changes in elevation.

Google announced the introduction of lite navigation as part of a broader effort related to sustainability. So as you might imagine, it’s not the only cycling-related announcement the company had. It also shared that information related to bike and scooter sharing is available in 300 cities globally.

Google

For those that still depend on their car, eco-friendly car routing, which Google announced at the end of March, is now available in the US. With today’s rollout, Maps will display the most fuel-efficient route you can take to a destination, in addition to the fastest one as it has always done. The tool will also display your relative fuel savings should you decide to follow the more efficient route. Google estimates the feature may help prevent as much as 1 million tons of carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere. That’s about the equivalent of removing 200,000 cars from the road. The company expects to roll out eco-friendly routing to European countries sometime in 2022.

In 2019, Axel Grell, the designer of Sennheiser’s legendary HD580 and HD800 headphones, left the company to found Grell Audio. Two years later, the startup is coming out with a pair of true wireless headphones known as the TWS/1. Set to cost $200 when they go on sale next month, they feature components individually sourced and designed by Grell. Highlights include custom 10mm drivers, support for ANC and a proprietary feature called Noise Annoyance Reduction (NAR) that the company claims cancels out high-end noises.

Grell Audio

Codec support is also extensive. In addition to mainstays like SBC and AAC, the earbuds can connect to your device over LHDC, aptX, aptX HD and aptX adaptive. Outside of a handful of proprietary Sony formats, all that’s missing here is Qualcomm’s recently announced aptX Lossless codec. You can get up to 28 hours of battery life from the headphones with the included charging case.

Grell plans to employ a direct-to-consumer model that will see the company sell the TWS/1 earbuds exclusively through its website and Drop. Pre-orders open today, with general availability to follow in November. The Drop version of the headphones will be known as the tws.01 and feature an all-black finish and come with an additional set of blue wingtips.

Following Monday’s massive service outage that took out all of its services, Facebook has published a blog post detailing what happened yesterday. According to Santosh Janardhan, the company's vice president of infrastructure, the outage started with what should have been routine maintenance. At some point yesterday, a command was issued that was supposed to assess the availability of the backbone network that connects all of Facebook’s disparate computing facilities. Instead, the order unintentionally took those connections down. Janardhan says a bug in the company’s internal audit system did not properly prevent the command from executing.

That issue caused a secondary problem that ultimately made yesterday’s outage into the international incident that it became. When Facebook’s DNS servers couldn’t connect to the company’s primary data centers, they stopped advertising the border gateway protocol (BGP) routing information that every device on the internet needs to connect to a server.

“The end result was that our DNS servers became unreachable even though they were still operational,” said Janardhan. “This made it impossible for the rest of the internet to find our servers.”

As we learned partway yesterday, what made an already difficult situation worse was that the outage made it impossible for Facebook engineers to connect to the servers they needed to fix. Moreover, the loss of DNS functionality meant they couldn’t use many of the internal tools they depend on to investigate and resolve networking issues in normal circumstances. That meant the company had to physically send personnel to its data centers, a task that was complicated by the physical safeguards it had in place at those locations.

“They’re hard to get into, and once you’re inside, the hardware and routers are designed to be difficult to modify even when you have physical access to them,” according to Janardhan. Once it could restore its backbone network, Facebook was cautious not to turn everything back on all at once since the surging power and computing demands may have led to more crashes.

“Every failure like this is an opportunity to learn and get better, and there’s plenty for us to learn from this one,” said Janardhan. “After every issue, small and large, we do an extensive review process to understand how we can make our systems more resilient. That process is already underway.”

Remember Hyper Scape? No? Well, apparently neither does Ubisoft. The publisher is working on a new battle royale that will take players to the Tom Clancy universe. On Tuesday, the company announced Ghost Recon Frontline. Like many of its contemporaries, the free-to-play title will pit you and two other teammates against more than one hundred other players. 

If the Call of Duty: Warzone comparisons weren't inevitable already, Frontline moves the series away from its traditional third-person perspective to a first-person one. However, where Ubisoft's Bucharest studio hopes to differentiate the game is with a tweak to the battle royale formula. In Frontline's signature Expedition mode, you and your team will need to find three pieces of intel scattered across an island map. The twist is that you later need to extract that information by calling in an airlift. Other teams can ambush you during this crucial moment and steal the data you fought so hard to obtain. The playspace also won't get smaller as a match progresses.     

The franchise’s most recent outing, 2019’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint, was, to put it mildly, a disastrous release for Ubisoft. Thanks to its unfinished state, the game performed so poorly in its first week of availability that the company delayed all of its biggest 2020 releases. It then went on to spend months patching Breakpoint, but the game never quite recovered from the reputation it earned at launch. Ubisoft said it plans to continue to support Breakpoint while working on Frontline.  

Ubisoft didn't share a release date for Ghost Recon Frontline, but it said it would hold a closed PC test starting on October 14th that people in select countries across Europe can sign up to take part in by visiting the game's website.

If you turn to Facebook Gaming to watch other people play your favorite games, you’ll now see creators collaborate on joint streams. Facebook is introducing support for co-streaming. The feature allows up to four accounts to stream together concurrently. With today’s rollout, co-streaming is available to all content creators, not just those enrolled in Facebook’s partner program. You can access the functionality search for and tag other creators through the Live Producer left rail, in addition to the Gaming Tab and Stream Dashboard of the edit stream module.

“With co-streaming, we aim to increase discoverability for creators, encourage collaboration between creators and elevate the overall viewing experience for everyone,” the company said in a blog post. The addition of co-streaming support is a case of Facebook playing catch up. Twitch has offered similar functionality through its Squad Stream feature since 2019. It’s also worth pointing out the idea itself isn’t new. While it’s no longer around, OnLive introduced a multi-view feature back in 2012. All the same, it’s a significant addition for Facebook Gaming, particularly as it continues to try to compete with Twitch.

Snap is introducing a new tool to help more young Americans get involved in politics. Dubbed “Run for Office,” the Mini adds a curated database of more than 75,000 local and state elected positions Snapchat users can browse directly through the app.

Before you see a list of opportunities, the tool will ask you to share some of the issues you’re passionate about in your daily life. Those can include things like the environment, the economy, education and more. Additionally, Snapchat users can also use the tool to nominate their friends.

The company built Run for Office with help from New American Leaders and nine other candidate recruitment organizations. Once someone indicates they’re interested in pursuing an opportunity, the Mini will connect them with those groups to provide them with candidate training.

“Running for office shouldn’t be just for those who are white and wealthy. If we want a democracy that works for and represents all of us, then we need leaders who reflect our increasingly diverse, multicultural communities” said Ghida Dagher, president of New American Leaders. 

By Snap’s estimation, it’s ideally positioned to help get more young people involved in politics since it reaches approximately 90 percent of 13 to 24-year-olds in the US. This isn’t the company’s first foray into politics. Ahead of the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential election, the company added voting resources to help drive higher voter turnout in those contests.

Following a preview at I/O 2021 and multiple betas since then, the next version of Google's mobile operating system is ready for prime time. Android 12 is now officially available. But if you own an Android device, don't get excited just yet. With today's announcement, Google is uploading the source code to the operating system to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). As things stand, the update isn't publicly available on any current devices. But that should change soon.

Google says it will start rolling out Android 12 to Pixel devices starting sometime in the "next few weeks," with availability on Samsung, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Tecno, Vivo and Xiaomi devices to follow later this year. Once the OS finally makes it to your device, you can look forward to checking out Google's new Material You design language, an updated privacy dashboard that includes a timeline of all the data the apps on your phone have accessed, the ability to capture scrolling screenshots, a new one-handed mode and more. Until then, the wait continues.    

If you can't access Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp, you're not the only one. Starting at approximately 11:38AM ET, Downdetector began logging a spike in outage reports across all four Facebook-owned services. Andy Stone, a spokesperson for the company, said at 12:07PM ET that the company was working quickly to resolve the issue but didn't mention what was at the root of the problem. We've reached out to Facebook for more information on the outage.

Nearly three years after coming out to take on Steam, the Epic Games Store is about to get more robust support for achievements. Starting next week, you’ll have the chance to earn XP by completing specific tasks in select games. Some of the titles that will support the feature out of the gate include Rocket League, Hades, Pillars of Eternity and Alan Wake Remastered, with more to come later in the year.

Epic’s system includes four tiers of achievements, with each level granting you a different amount of XP. For instance, in unlocking a bronze-level accomplishment, you’ll earn between five and 45 XP, while a gold one will net you as much as 200 XP. Once you accrue 1,000 XP in a single game, you’ll earn its platinum achievement.

With the update, Epic is also rolling out new pages where you can track and share the progress you’re making towards unlocking all the goals in a specific game. You’ll also see that information displayed through the library interface.

One thing to note is that this new system is different from the developer achievements Epic implemented about a year ago. That system will continue to be there for developers who don’t want to engage with the new one, though the company says it expects “this new system will roll out [to] all developers on the Epic Games Store in the coming months.”