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CES 2015: LG has already teased it will be showing off a bunch of 4K TVs at CES 2015 next week, but the South Korean giant has just announced it will also be showcasing its new 21:9 ultra-wide monitors, too.

These monitors will be powered by AMD's FreeSync technology, which make ultra-wide monitors even better for gamers. We only just reviewed the LG 34UC97 and loved it, but it definitely needed better gaming chops and well, here we are. The upcoming 34UM67 is LG's first 21:9 ultra-wide gaming monitor that was designed for gaming, featuring AMD's FreeSync technology.

Roy Taylor, AMD's Corporate Vice President of ISV/IHV Partner Group explains "AMD FreeSync technology is an innovative monitor technology, based on free and open industry standards, to eliminate the tearing and stuttering that has plagued PC gaming for 30 years. We are pleased that LG Electronics stands with us with truly exciting AMD FreeSync-ready displays like the LG UltraWide Gaming Monitor."

Microsoft is currently tweaking its latest SDK for the Xbox One, something that Dying Light developer Techland has gotten its hands-on. We've heard that Dying Light will be running at 1080p and 30FPS on the Xbox One and PS4, but it looks like the Xbox One side of things received its 1080p 30FPS target thanks to the latest update.

The update in question provides developers with the ability of tweaking the Xbox One's eSRAM usage, where performance can be improved. The Lead Game Designer on Dying Light, Maciej Binkowski explains "We were using the latest version just prior to the new release that came out on December 12th. In terms of advantages, the main thing is just how much the ESRAM control has improved. The new API allows you to do a lot more with the ESRAM, things devs have always wanted to do but were not easily accessible. This together with better tools (PIX) allowed us to really improve performance and tweak ESRAM usage."

PIX, or Performance Investigator is a software tool used by developers on the Xbox One to analyze and debug their code in order to increase the performance of their titles. There have been a few developers that have been doing this, squeezing out as much performance as they can from the current (at the time) SDK. These developers include Bungie with Destiny, and Rockstar with Grand Theft Auto V, so Techland isn't the only one doing some tweaking with Dying Light.

According to a BBC report, scientists tracing this years deadly Ebola virus outbreak have found a correlation between patient zero; two year old Emile Ouamouno and a colony of bats in Guinea.

During their four-week field trip in April 2014, Dr Fabian Leendertz and his colleagues found a large tree stump located close to the boys home. Now, Leendertz believes that the reeds and oil palm cultivations nearby attracted the bats, whose droppings likely infected Emile as he played in the hollow tree. On the release of his report, Dr Leendertz said "The Ebola virus must jump through colonies from bat to bat, so we need to know more."

The World Health Organisation believes that the 2014 outbreak claimed the lives of nearly 8,000 people worldwide, with the majority of victims coming from Liberia.

As confirmed by Nintendo's UK Twitter, the age-old classic Game Boy Tetris will be pulled from the eShop durng the last day of 2014.

This marks the end of an era, with Tetris on the original Game Boy being a title that helped define handheld gaming globally and showcased exactly how exciting and awesome potable devices could be. If you ask anyone about a gaming title they might know, Tetris is always one of the first to mind - a timeless classic that still facilitates global competitions and events being conducted to this very day.

There has been no confirmation from Nintendo America or other regions as to if this game will be pulled from the e-shelves in their respective regions. Some news outlets are speculating that this game was pulled due to Nintendo's recent 3DS release of Ubisoft's Tetris Ultimate. Currently avilable for the bargain price of $3.99, please don't let this news ruin your fun - go and pick yourself up a piece of gaming history. We really hope that Ubisoft isn't at fault for this ordeal, it certainly couldn't do too well in improving the current markets public opinion of the big-name developer.

As seen on the official Halo Twitter account, Halo 5's multiplayer beta has been opened up to the public, ending on the 18th of January 2015.

Anyone who has purchased the Halo: The Master Chief Collection automatically should have access to this beta, with the full game set for launch this fall and exclusive to the next-gen Xbox One console.

This sequel is said to continue the story of Master Chief and introduce Spartan Locke, a brand new addition to the series. Once again you'll be fighting against peace-shattering invader aliens, seeing Spartan Locke on a mission to find the somewhat-elusive Master Chief alongside solving a complicated mystery that threatens the entire galaxy.

If you're running a previous generation console and are looking for a few cheap titles to place in your collection before the new year rolls around, Xbox are offering up a plethora of deals running right until the clock hits 12:00 am on the 1st of January.

Whether you're interested in FIFA 15 for only $29.99 or Game of Thrones for $2.49, this comprehensive list has games on offer for almost any console fan.

There are a few 'filler' titles on the list, however Microsoft have done a fairly good job of offering up some solid gaming offerings at reasonable prices. If full games aren't you thing however, you can purchase things like the World of Tanks Currency Mega Pack and other similar items.

The first word that escaped my mouth when setting eyes on this sponsored build was - "Wow". Stuart Tonks from GGF LAN was been sent some latest-release products from Kingston, ASUS and Coolermaster and told to do his best.

The feature for this case is the (rare) ASUS TUF Sabertooth Z97 Mark S motherboard, sent directly from the tech-giant to Tonks in order to create a build worth showing off to the island national Australia and the globe.

"His best" is this amazing, liquid cooled black-and-white case mod setup affectionately named "White Matter" by the creator himself. The full feature list reads:

Fan-made mods are simply breathtaking in this age of gaming. We've recently seen things such as the Skyrim Enderal mod adding a whole new game within a game, another Skyrim fan-update offering 4K resolution textures, bug fixes and more and various community made Counter-Strike: Global Offensive competitive maps and add-on's. All of these additions are what help keeps a title active, strong and relevant for months, or years, to come.

Thanks to Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes coming out on PC, some modders have taken to the model of developer Hideo Kojima that is on offer - adding him as the main playable character of the campaign. Thanks to the game engines capabilities, multiple models can be implemented as the main character on offer.

Stay tuned for more game modding news. It seems that we can only go up from here.

I sat reading through a press release thinking to myself, "wow these Samsung WAM6500 and WAM7500 speakers look awfully familiar." After a short while I noticed the connection between Samsung's latest creations and the much-loved Portal gun.

Providing a 360-degree path of audio, this new product is said to be able to fill up a room completely with sound using their "ring radiator" technology - helping combat the issue of a speaker almost always projecting its output in a cone-like fashion. Samsung Electronics' Senior Vice President, Jurack Chae, stated in their press release that "with the new WAM7500/6500 people can enjoy a vibrant sound wherever they are, while our new Curved Soundbars perfectly complement the TV viewing experience."

There hasn't been an announced release date or price as of yet, but if you're looking to create a modern style living space and are quite possibly a fan of the award-wining title Portal - this product might just be for you.

Known globally for their massive $78,000 season 17 incorporating American and European teams, ESEA have decided to further expand to the Asia-Pacific. This inclusion will see the prize pot increase to a sum of $100,000.

European teams being included in ESEA's online league and finals is still a rather new addition, seeing this competition gain massive global respect as many of the top CS:GO teams are located in European nations. It seems that the inclusion of Asia-Pacific is helping ESEA solidify their place as one of the world's largest tournament providers.

Along with this new region inclusion, ESEA are offering up a new recruitment section to assist teams and players in joining together for tournaments in preparation for their season 18 signup closure, set to happen on January the 5th next year. Over the next few weeks ESEA will be announcing further rule sets, map rotations and other essential tournament information. If you're interested in competing in this event, you'll have to head to their registration page before the cut-off date.

If you're not already aware, the Steam Sales Tracker is a brilliant tool, offering up an easy-to-see list of the current sales on offer, their time left of sale, the communities verdict on the game and also a handy extension to help link it to your personal steam account.

Steam are doing what they do best, churning out yet another sale period and drying up many other-enthusiastic gamers wallets. We've had a quick browse and consolidated some of the coolest game specials on offer right now.

As according to the Steam Sale tracker 'Community's Choice' section, the hottest titles available today include a 66 percent saving on Mercenary Kings, the indie side-scrolling puzzle game Gunpoint for only $4.99 USD and the addictive and simply designed LUFTRAUSERS game for half price.

The NSA responded to an ACLU FOIA request by releasing a bunch of documents to the public, but waited until the cover of Christmas Eve when everyone was busy with their families, admitting it had spied on normal, ordinary American citizens.

Considering the NSA has stood before Congress, claiming more than once that it was not abusing its very broad intelligence gathering operations and technologies, but now we know, for a fact, they did, and probably still are. The reports state "The heavily-redacted reports include examples of data on Americans being e-mailed to unauthorized recipients, stored in unsecured computers and retained after it was supposed to be destroyed, according to the documents. They were posted on the NSA's website at around 1:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve."

In a case back in 2012, an NSA analyst "searched her spouse's personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting," but don't worry, the NSA analyst in question "has been advised to cease her activities." Then there's this: "In 2012, an analyst conducted surveillance "on a U.S. organization in a raw traffic database without formal authorization because the analyst incorrectly believed that he was authorized to query due to a potential threat," according to the fourth-quarter report from 2012. The surveillance yielded nothing."

Boyd Multerer, the engineer who was responsible on leading development for Xbox Live and the XNA game development tools for Xbox, has left Microsoft after working with the Redmond-based giant for 17 years. Multerer announced he was leaving the Xbox team on Twitter, where he said "Goodbye Microsoft. It was a good run. Xbox was Great! Time to do something new."

Multerer joined the company in 1997, where in 2000 he was hired to lead development on the online side of the original Xbox console, which was called Xbox Online at the time. Multerer then hired the Xbox Live development team, leading the design of what would soon become Xbox Live. He not only lead the design, but the direction and implementation of Xbox Live, too. Multerer was the very first person to use Xbox Live, where he emphasized security and anti-cheating measures to be installed.

The engineer would later turn into the product manager on XNA, in order to meet "the pent-up demand of independent game developers" and build "the first open marketplace on a console." The all-rounder engineer eventually becvame the director of development for Xbox, where he was part of the Xbox One team and overlooked technical design and development of Microsoft's then next-gen Xbox. During a technical roundtable discussion, Multerer said "The last one, the box was fixed," explaining that the Xbox One can access "a growing number of transistors that are not that far away" that will allow the console push out "bigger world's, and take some of the things that are normally done locally and push them out."

In what apparently shouldn't be too surprising, Apple device activations from Dec. 19 to Dec. 25 made up 51 percent of new device activations, while Samsung was in the No. 2 spot with 18 percent, according to Flurry. Microsoft, Sony and LG rounded out the top five, as technology companies likely saw impressive sales growth when compared with the past two Christmas holiday shopping seasons.

"To put this in perspective, for every Samsung device that was activated, Apple activated 2.9 devices," said Jarah Euston, Flurry VP of analytics and marketing, in a public statement. "For every Microsoft Lumia device activated, Apple activated 8.8 devices."

The holiday season sees a spike in shopping but isn't the only indicator of the overall smartphone market - but shows Apple's sales and marketing machine is still in perfect running condition.

We only reported a couple of weeks ago that NVIDIA was rumored to launch its GeForce GTX 960 in January, but now some more information is coming through, including a price. At the time, I said that if the company launched the GTX 960 with a $199 price, it could be a hit. Well, this price could end up being true.

Various sources have confirmed that the GTX 960 will rock the GM206 core, but we could end up seeing NVIDIA use a cut down GM204 core, too. We have heard previously that the GTX 960 would feature 4GB of RAM spread across a 256-bit memory bus, but now we're hearing that the GTX 960 could feature a 128-bit bus.

Speculation is starting, where we could also see a GTX 965 or GTX 960 Ti arrive, where we could see the GTX 960 feature a 128-bit bus while the GTX 960 Ti version could throw things up to a 256-bit memory bus. We are still expecting one 6-pin PCIe connector and a total of 150W TDP, which will have mid-range systems enjoying a low-power, but high performing GPU.

Sony can't catch a break lately, with their internal servers being breached by North Korea - well, at least the United States government and FBI is claiming they did - while their PlayStation Network was slammed down on Christmas Day by hacking group The Lizard Squad.

Sony's PSN service still experiencing "intermittent connectivity issues," something the company has taken to its PlayStation Knowledge Center to talk about. Some are able to sign onto their PS3, PS4 and PS Vita devices, but aren't able to sign into, or access the PlayStation Store, or get their Friends list to display.

The company is now asking gamers to attempt tweaking their MTU settings in their console's network configuration options, which could fix the problems they're having accessing the PlayStation Network.

According to the latest rumors, Microsoft might be finally replacing Internet Explorer with something by the codename of "Spartan." Spartan would feature things we all know and love in browsers like Google CHrome, such as support for extensions, and much more. ZDNet is going as far as saying Spartan could be an entirely new browser, which is something I'd love to see from Microsoft.

ZDNey's Mary Jo Foley, who is usually spot on with Microsoft rumors, has said that the underlying structure of Spartan or whatever it will arrive as, won't change that much. The new browser will arrive with Windows 10, and will be a super-light client like Chrome and Firefox, rocking extension support when it arrives. We don't know if Spartan will be supported on non-Windows operating systems, such as Android, iOS and OS X, but that's something we should find out in the New Year.

Foley says that Windows 10 should include both the new Spartan browser, and IE11, with IE11 sitting there for backwards compatibility only. For keen-eyed readers, you might notice "Spartan" refers to Halo, just like Cortana does. Replacing Internet Explorer is going to be a hard task for Microsoft, but if they can do it right, they can kill the bad word that IE has stuck to it, hopefully doing things right going into Windows 10 and 2015.

Biometric security just took a big blow to the chin. Fingerprint scanners are increasingly used for security in Apple and Samsung devices, along with many others, and are even used for voter identification in some countries. At a recent conference in Hamburg, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) hacker network revealed they had copied German Defense minister Ursula von der Leyens' fingerprint from publically available photos of a press conference she held.

The photos were taken from standard cameras, and several images were used to stitch together the copied thumbprint. One fingerprint may have taken a bit of work to accomplish, but now that the proof-of-concept experiment has succeeded it would be relatively easy to refine the process. This isn't the best news for politicians and others who are regularly photographed, and it might be wise to move to other technologies to secure access to devices.

Biometric scanning isn't considered the safest of identification verification technologies, chiefly because most systems can be fooled with replicas. There are new technologies emerging that provide better verification techniques, such as vein scanning. New finger scanners actually look for the unique vein patterns inside the finger, which would be impossible to replicate through photos. This also has the great side-benefit of requiring a living human to work, so copies are not a feasible approach to defeating these systems.

Devices in the household are getting smarter, and that trend will increase in 2015, as more consumers test connected devices away from TVs and set-top boxes, analysts believe. There are high expectations for security systems to enjoy strong smart growth, with the ability to arm systems from mobile devices, access live video streams remotely, and have systems learn behavior patterns.

However, manufacturers need to be careful not to add connectivity just for the sake of adding internet and other features simply because they can.

"It's one thing if [the technology] seamlessly fits in and there's a benefit, it's another if you're asking people to get out the screwdriver and pliers or change the way they do things," said Robert Brunner, founder of the Ammunition design firm that helped create the Beats headphones, in a statement published by NBC News. "Do you really need a smart can opener that texts you when the can is open?"

Roll up Lizard Squad and Anonymous members, it's time to put your skills to the test. MasterCard has just announced through a press release that they will be running massive hacker collective competition across 10 cities with the ultimate prize being $100,000 in cold, hard cash.

Conducted through the use of MasterCard-supplies APIs, the entrants will compete to "create innovative prototypes that demonstrate artful coding and design skills while also articulating clear business use cases - all focused on driving the next generation of commerce applications" as according to their release.

If you fancy yourself as a computer security expert and think you have what it take to get to round two - the winning team from each region will be sent to Silicon Valley to compete in the Grand Finale Masters of Code 'hackathon'. This event features the $100k grand-prize and a few extras up for grabs: