Microsoft has trumpeted the release of Xbox Series X and S as its biggest Xbox launch ever, though not provided any specific sales figures. From a report: Xbox boss Phil Spencer broke the news on Twitter today, noting that "more Xbox consoles had been sold, in more countries, than ever before" and that many more were on the way. Xbox Series X/S are sold out in many places, making this - like many console launches -- simply a matter of how many console boxes Microsoft can inject into retailers to sell on launch day. The mention of more countries this time around is also important. Xbox Series S/X arrived on the same day in 37 markets, compared to just 13 for the Xbox One. Still, as video games analyst Daniel Ahmad points out, any total now the largest ever for Xbox means it was higher than the 1m units Microsoft managed at the Xbox One's launch -- which is no mean feat in the middle of a pandemic.

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The origins of C++ date back 40 years, yet it remains one of the most widely used programming languages today. TechRepublic spoke to C++ creator, Bjarne Stroustrup, to find out why. An excerpt from the interview: Today, Stroustrup is a Technical Fellow at Morgan Stanley. His work with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for the C++ standard and on the C++ Core Guidelines are considered part of his role with the finance giant, and he remains very much involved in the development of C++. Most notably, Stroustrup forms part of the direction group, which presents and discusses recommendation about the future of the programming language. He also follows the evolution group, and takes part in discussions about new language features. When it comes to the day-to-day running of C++, however, Stroustrup is happy to take more of a backseat role. "I follow administrative activities but try to do as little as possible there. I am not a great administrator," he admits. Before the pandemic, Stroustrup would travel a lot to teach, and to explain C++ to the world at large through his books, articles, and interviews -- though much like the rest of the world, 2020 has put a temporary end to this. "For my work, I depend critically on talking with people to learn about their problems and hear how my ideas might help them," Stroustrup says. "In this time of the pandemic, I am deprived of much-needed feedback. Virtual talks and interviews are not the same, and the dynamic of Zoom meetings are inferior to real face-to-face meetings when it comes to discussing design and ideas." The COVID-19 pandemic has also hindered progress with the next two iterations of the language, C++20 and C++23, though Stroustrup affirms that "almost all" of C++20 will ship in 2020. "Beyond that, there is work on Unicode, numerics, game development and low latency, tooling, AI, and much more," he says. "We ship a feature (language and library) when it is ready, and we issue a revised standard every three years. C++14, C++17, and C++20 shipped on time. It is worth noting that the standards effort and the major implementors are very much in sync. "It is crucial that C++ remains coherent and is a stable platform for development."

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A potential hostage situation is reportedly taking place at the building in which game developer Ubisoft's Montreal office is housed. From a report: A group of suspects are reportedly holding tens of people hostage at Ubisoft Montreal, according to local (French-language) media outlet LCN. The situation reportedly began around 1:30pm Eastern Time. Montreal police confirmed that there is an "ongoing police operation" at the intersection where Ubisoft Montreal sits, adding, "We ask people to avoid the area. The SPVM is currently validating information and more details will follow."

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YouTube says it will not produce its annual end-of-year "Rewind" video this year, due to the global pandemic. The BBC reports: The video-sharing platform has produced an annual retrospective since 2010, featuring well-known YouTube stars referencing big viral moments. But, in a statement it said: "2020 has been different. And it doesn't feel right to carry on as if it weren't." Journalist Chris Stokel-Walker, who writes about YouTube and other social platforms, said it was a shame that Rewind had been cancelled because YouTube had become "a major source of entertainment and support for people during the pandemic." But he added: "There's just not that much new that's come out of YouTube this year. It's been outmoded and overtaken as the place that trends begin, by more nimble apps like TikTok. "Rewind has always featured a similar cast of characters since it started in 2010, but the potential list of people they could feature would look even more stale in 2020 in comparison to other platforms."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, an Amazon AWS blogpost announced that the company has moved most of the cloud processing for its Alexa personal assistant off of Nvidia GPUs and onto its own Inferentia Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). Amazon dev Sebastien Stormacq describes the Inferentia's hardware design as follows: "AWS Inferentia is a custom chip, built by AWS, to accelerate machine learning inference workloads and optimize their cost. Each AWS Inferentia chip contains four NeuronCores. Each NeuronCore implements a high-performance systolic array matrix multiply engine, which massively speeds up typical deep learning operations such as convolution and transformers. NeuronCores are also equipped with a large on-chip cache, which helps cut down on external memory accesses, dramatically reducing latency and increasing throughput." When an Amazon customer -- usually someone who owns an Echo or Echo dot -- makes use of the Alexa personal assistant, very little of the processing is done on the device itself. [...] According to Stormacq, shifting this inference workload from Nvidia GPU hardware to Amazon's own Inferentia chip resulted in 30-percent lower cost and 25-percent improvement in end-to-end latency on Alexa's text-to-speech workloads. Amazon isn't the only company using the Inferentia processor -- the chip powers Amazon AWS Inf1 instances, which are available to the general public and compete with Amazon's GPU-powered G4 instances. Amazon's AWS Neuron software development kit allows machine-learning developers to use Inferentia as a target for popular frameworks, including TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet.

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Axiom Space has signed three private astronauts to join former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-AlegrÃa on Ax-1, the first private mission into orbit and to the International Space Station. From a report: In March, Axiom Space announced plans to launch "history's first fully private human spaceflight mission to the International Space Station." The mission, dubbed Ax-1, would go forward using SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle to deliver private astronauts to the ISS for at least eight days. At the International Astronautical Congress last month, Axiom CEO Michael Suffredini said the company was aiming to launch in the fourth quarter of 2021. Details are still sparse. We know that former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-AlegrÃa will be part of the mission, but the three other astronauts have not been announced yet. The promotional image Axiom posted Wednesday features three male silhouettes, suggesting there will be no female astronauts on board. There is some excitable chatter on Twitter and other places suggesting that two of the other astronauts might be actor Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman, who have been in talks with NASA about filming a movie on the ISS. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine mentioned in June that Axiom was involved in those talks.

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If the Repubs prevail in Georgia, they will obstruct our recovery from the virus, to get a Repub elected in 2024. Maybe the alpha narcissist isn't Trump, it's Moscow Mitch.

Today's song: Surly Joe.

Researchers at Google claim to have developed a machine learning model that can separate a sound source from noisy, single-channel audio based on only a short sample of the target source. In a paper [PDF], they say their SoundFilter system can be tuned to filter arbitrary sound sources, even those it hasn't seen during training. From a report: The researchers believe a noise-eliminating system like SoundFilter could be used to create a range of useful technologies. For instance, Google drew on audio from thousands of its own meetings and YouTube videos to train the noise-canceling algorithm in Google Meet. Meanwhile, a team of Carnegie Mellon researchers created a "sound-action-vision" corpus to anticipate where objects will move when subjected to physical force. SoundFilter treats the task of sound separation as a one-shot learning problem. The model receives as input the audio mixture to be filtered and a single short example of the kind of sound to be filtered out. Once trained, SoundFilter is expected to extract this kind of sound from the mixture if present.

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I asked Michael Hunt about the status of the Woodstock Library bond issue. "Down by 80 votes but over 1000 absentees to count by November 17. We won early voting by 10 points (55% to 45%) but got clobbered on Election Day. I think absentees could look like early voting. It will be a nailbiter but it ain’t over."

This week's Joe Trippi podcast is a must-listen. He says the Senate Republicans are playing Trump. They need him to win the Georgia runoffs on January 5. Trippi has experience managing (and winning) the Doug Jones special election in Alabama in 2017 and thinks turnout in the Georgia runoff may be similar (ie much lower than on November 3). Democratic turnout will be managed ably by Stacey Abrams. Trippi says the letter Loeffler and Perdue sent to the Georgia secretary of state demanding he resign was primarily for Trump, look boss we're carrying your water, come campaign for us! Once the runoff is done, the story goes, they will dump Trump and turn to the Biden inauguration. If they lose in Georgia, they become the minority party, and McConnell et al don't want that. Pretty amazing how depraved these Republican senators are, if Trippi is right, and I suspect he is. All for two years in the majority, obstructing the recovery from the virus.

Security researcher Jeffrey Paul, writes in a blog post: On modern versions of macOS, you simply can't power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored. It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn't realize this, because it's silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you're offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn't hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone's apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet. Because it does this using the internet, the server sees your IP, of course, and knows what time the request came in. An IP address allows for coarse, city-level and ISP-level geolocation, and allows for a table that has the following headings: Date, Time, Computer, ISP, City, State, Application Hash; Apple (or anyone else) can, of course, calculate these hashes for common programs: everything in the App Store, the Creative Cloud, Tor Browser, cracking or reverse engineering tools, whatever. This means that Apple knows when you're at home. When you're at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend's house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city. "Who cares?" I hear you asking. Well, it's not just Apple. This information doesn't stay with them: These OCSP requests are transmitted unencrypted. Everyone who can see the network can see these, including your ISP and anyone who has tapped their cables. These requests go to a third-party CDN run by another company, Akamai. Since October of 2012, Apple is a partner in the US military intelligence community's PRISM spying program, which grants the US federal police and military unfettered access to this data without a warrant, any time they ask for it. In the first half of 2019 they did this over 18,000 times, and another 17,500+ times in the second half of 2019. This data amounts to a tremendous trove of data about your life and habits, and allows someone possessing all of it to identify your movement and activity patterns. For some people, this can even pose a physical danger to them. Now, it's been possible up until today to block this sort of stuff on your Mac using a program called Little Snitch (really, the only thing keeping me using macOS at this point). In the default configuration, it blanket allows all of this computer-to-Apple communication, but you can disable those default rules and go on to approve or deny each of these connections, and your computer will continue to work fine without snitching on you to Apple. The version of macOS that was released today, 11.0, also known as Big Sur, has new APIs that prevent Little Snitch from working the same way. The new APIs don't permit Little Snitch to inspect or block any OS level processes. Additionally, the new rules in macOS 11 even hobble VPNs so that Apple apps will simply bypass them.

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Volkswagen has raised its planned investment on digital and electric vehicle technologies to 73 billion euros ($86 billion) over the next five years as it seeks to hold onto its crown as the world's largest carmaker in a new green era. From a report: Under a plan presented on Friday, Volkswagen said it would allocate nearly half its investment budget of 150 billion euros on e-mobility, hybrid cars, a seamless, software-based vehicle operating system and self-driving technologies. In last year's plan, the German car and truck maker, which owns brands including VW, Audi, Porsche, Seat and Skoda, had earmarked 60 billion euros for electric and self-driving vehicles out of the 150 billion budget. A global clampdown on emissions, partly triggered by VW's diesel pollution scandal in 2015, has forced carmakers to accelerate the development of low-emission technology, even for their low-margin mainstream models.

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The world's largest vaccine maker is ramping up production of AstraZeneca Plc's Covid-19 shot, aiming to have 100 million doses ready by December for an inoculation drive that could begin across India that same month. From a report: If final-stage trial data show AstraZeneca's candidate gives effective protection from the virus, the Serum Institute of India -- which is partnered to produce at least one billion doses -- may get emergency authorization from New Delhi by December, said Adar Poonawalla, chief executive officer of the family-owned firm based in the western city of Pune. That initial amount will go to India, Poonawalla said in an interview on Thursday. Full approval early next year will allow distribution on a 50-50 basis with the South Asian nation and Covax, the World Health Organization-backed body that's purchasing shots for poor nations. Serum, which has tied up with five developers, has so far made 40 million doses of AstraZeneca's vaccine in the past two months and aims to start manufacturing Novavax's contender soon.

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Microsoft said Friday it has detected at least seven attacks on companies working to develop a COVID-19 vaccine or treatments. From a report: The company said attacks by three nation-state actors -- two from North Korea and one from Russia -- have targeted companies in Canada, France, India, South Korea and the United States. "Two global issues will help shape people's memories of this time in history -- COVID-19 and the increased use of the internet by malign actors to disrupt society," Microsoft deputy general counsel Tom Burt said in a blog post. "It's disturbing that these challenges have now merged as cyberattacks are being used to disrupt health care organizations fighting the pandemic." Attackers have used a range of approaches including phishing schemes and brute force to get needed passwords, with one group tied to North Korea posing as the World Health Organization in its spear-phishing effort. Microsoft said its built-in security protections stopped a majority of the attacks. "We've notified all organizations targeted, and where attacks have been successful, we've offered help," Burt said.

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