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The sophisticated Regin stealth malware, which has been in operation since at least 2008, was likely created by the US and UK governments to spy on other governments and businesses. Specifically, the NSA and GCHQ most likely spearheaded the project, with the malware's first target against the European Union (EU).

"Having analyzed this malware and look at the [previously published] Snowden documents," said Ronald Prins, security expert. "I'm convinced Regin is used by British and American intelligence services."

Russia was the most heavily infected nation, racking up 28 percent of Regin's wrath, while 24 percent was in Saudi Arabia, Ireland (9 percent), Belgium (5 percent), and Austria (5 percent) rounded out the list of most infected nations.

The grand jury empaneled to decide whether to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown has reached a decision, which will be released later today. Local, state, and federal law enforcement have been bracing for a spate of renewed protests and violent actions in the wake of the pending announcement. Ferguson law enforcement has been asked by community groups to warn them 48 hours prior to the release of the decision so they could brace for public reaction. Many have also decried that as merely a plan for protesters to get organized and prepared for mass violent protests.

Ferguson officials are apparently not providing the aforementioned warning, and plan to announce the verdict this afternoon. Businesses have been boarding up storefronts over the weekend in anticipation of the ruling, which is due any hour now. Even if there is a decision to indict Darren Wilson it may not be enough to assuage protesters.

Officer Wilson can be charged with a variety of crimes, and many are calling for a first degree murder charge. They can also charge him with second degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, and involuntary manslaughter. There is also the option of an armed criminal action charge. Any of the lesser charges will likely trigger strong public reaction as well. Federal prosecutors have all but announced they are unable to bring charges against the officer, so any decision today will likely result in the only charges, if any are filed at all.

Intel enjoys a 97.8% share of the server CPU market, and with AMD continuing to slide, it hasn't looked like anyone can break Intel's stranglehold. Popular new architectures in the datacenter have brought about customized low-power designs that can handle light-impact workloads. Right-sizing servers to the task at hand lowers cost and eases cooling requirements, and ARM processors have attractive low-power features that have always been an interesting alternative in the datacenter. Some Xeons operate within a TDP envelope of 90 Watts, but many 64-bit ARM designs operate between 10 and 45 Watts. Low cost is also another incentive to use ARM CPUs, but a lack of specialized chips and systems has hampered expansion.

This radical reduction in power consumption has led many enterprise powerhouses, such as Red Hat, to institute development projects to boost software development for 64-bit ARM platforms. Microsoft has even gotten in on the ARM-compatibility act by developing Windows RT. RT has been a failure of sorts, but many consider it to be the gateway to ARM-compatible Windows Server flavors. The expanding ecosystem development to further 64-bit ARM processors in the datacenter has placed the onus on suppliers to step up with competitive ARM offerings. One supplier with considerable heft in the ARM category has remained conspicuously silent on server CPU models, until now.

Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkomp has reportedly announced intentions to bring ARM server CPU's into their lineup. Qualcomm's entrance into the server CPU market isn't likely to budge Intel from the top spot anytime soon, but there are other advantages to increased competition. Intel's dominating market share allows them to charge a premium for their server CPUs. A low-cost alternative, backed by a bastion like Qualcomm, could open up more competitive pricing from Intel in the future. There is no announcement on release dates, but considering the slowing growth rate in other segments we can expect Qualcomm to move quickly.

It appears Microsoft Xbox Live was not compromised after all, despite the "DerpTrolling" group saying they had stolen more than 1,000 Windows Live usernames and passwords.

"We immediately investigated reports regarding some Microsoft Accounts including Windows Live and Hotmail and can confirm that no Microsoft site or service was compromised," Microsoft told GameSpot. "Microsoft takes account security and privacy seriously. Should we identify any specific account at risk for any reason, we will take action to protect the account."

To stay better defended, Microsoft also recommended users create strong passwords, change their passwords frequently, and don't use the same passwords for multiple websites and services.

Smartwatches are becoming more popular, and many analysts expect retailers to experience brisk sales during the holiday shopping season. Android Wear smartwatches are very popular and six of the top models use Android. This has naturally led to an increase in apps for the popular gear, but some aren't that excited. Swiss watchmakers are particularly incensed that their designs are being replicated and distributed for free. Smartwatch users can easily download custom watch faces that feature the same look as $20,000 watches from Rolex, Cartier, Omega, and Patek Philippe, among others.

Swiss watchmakers are up in arms, so to speak, and sending 24 hour take-down notices to several sites hosting 'pirated' watch faces. Watch face patents are valuable IP for watchmakers, and in the past they have pursued vigorous legal action to protect their property. Apple famously paid $21 million dollars in 2012 to licence the Swiss clock face design used in iOS6, and several other Swiss firms are threatening legal action against sites that host pirated watch faces.

The cloud is growing in popularity, and is having a major impact on the current state of the gaming market. A combination of cloud gaming capable devices, hardware makers jumping into market, and increasing network performance will push the market to new levels in 2015, according to the Strategy Analytics tech research group.

For example, NVIDIA Grid Game Streaming Service and PlayStation Now will end the year with almost 30 million devices, and that number is expected to increase 500 percent up to 150 million consumers by the end of 2015.

"2014 is proving to be a watershed moment with major players putting their credibility and brand names on the line to make cloud gaming work," said Michael Goodman, Strategy Analytics' Director of Digital Media Strategies. "While broadband speeds and consumer acceptance of subscription models have come a long away, access to content remains an issue for all services. The major video game publishers have so far successfully managed an incremental transition from physical to digital media, but cloud gaming offers publishers a new revenue stream."

Hardware maker ASRock introduced the X99 WS-E/10G motherboard, the latest X99 enthusiast and workstation motherboard supporting Dual Intel X540 10GBase-T LAN, quad LAN, Windows Server OS, and supporting PCIe Gen3 video cards (4-way SLI or CrossFire X).

ASRock included support for LGA 2011-3 CPUs that range from 18 core 160W Xeon E5-16000/2600 V3 CPUs to unlocked Intel Core i7 CPUs. The X99 WS-E/10G also has eight DDR4 memory slots with support for UDIMM/RDIMM memory modules up to 128GB capacity. There are 12 SATA3 ports, 1 SATA Express 10Gb/s connector, 1 PCIe Gen2 x4 M.2 slot, a SATA DOM and a USB DOM.

The motherboard supports the Intel X540 Ethernet controller, with the single chip able to support dual 10G BASE-T LAN ports, significantly faster than regular gigabit LAN. 10GBase-T can be easily integrated, but the 10GBase-T Ethernet card is pricing, along with a higher level of power consumption.

Rockstar Games was able to resolve problems that some Grand Theft Auto V players on the Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4 game consoles reported at the start of the weekend. Despite posting a workaround, it appeared most gamers simply waited until Rockstar Games was able to fix the problem for them.

The Xbox One GTA V Title Update 1.03 was released on Saturday afternoon, and was focused just on improving server stability.

The Xbox One and PS4 have proven to be popular among gamers, but certain game studios appear to be having trouble releasing video games that don't need immediate improvements. GTA V was released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on September 17, and released for the PS4 and Xbox One on November 18 - a PC version will be released on January 27.

Popular image board Reddit has made their "Ask Me Anything" platform an extremely popular way for celebrities, politicians and persons of interest to talk to members of the public through an 'ask and tell' type scenario. However, there are times when this simple instance of self-promotion can go extremely wrong, or very right. The last time we saw such a blowout in /r/IAmA was that of Woody Harrelson's PR agent pretending to be him, which was a massive contrast to hilarious offerings like lil Jon's "sleep or police".

As described in a wrap-up Reddit post by Reddit user Fluffy017, "it goes about as well as you'd expect". The general population of Reddit can be seen as 'internet activists', with many instances being reported of them achieving things such as financing Kickstarter campaigns all the way to getting a NASCAR car sponsored by their popular 'Doge' meme.

Net Neutrality is a hot topic among this online board and defined as defined as "the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication." Basically meaning, certain companies could receive an unfavorable advantage simply due to their positioning. market share or who's income they decide to supplement.

30 years later, Susan Kare has listed reproductions of the famous Apple Mac Pirate Flag on her website for sale. Originally flying back in 1983, these hand painted copies will be sold at a price of up to $2,500 US.

Kare was originally assigned the painting of this flag near the beginning of Apples existence, the design said to be inspired by a slogan of the late Steve Jobs to inspire his team. It was an amalgamation of three sayings tied into one and read: "Real artists ship. It's better to be a pirate than join the navy. Mac in a book by 1986."

Steve Capps, a Macintosh programmer suggested that Jobs convert this into a symbol - a flag. The birth of this object has been described as: "LA few days before we moved into the new building, Capps bought some black cloth and sewed it into a flag. He asked Susan Kare to paint a big skull and crossbones in white at the center. The final touch was the requisite eye-patch, rendered by a large, rainbow-colored Apple logo decal."

Pebble's smarwatch has just received a version 2.8 firmware update that has seen 80 languages supported alongside notification support for Android applications.

Looking at Pebble's website, you can see their comprehensive list of languages on offer and how some of them are displayed on your handheld interface. But the most exciting update here comes in the form of Android notification support. Available for use with both iOS and Android systems, Pebble was missing the crucial ability to tee up with your Android phone, pushing notifications from this device handily to your wrist watch. Fixed in the latest update, we wouldn't be surprised to see Pebble stocks rise a little in the coming weeks.

Pebble's Vice President of Software Engineering, Kean Wong, released a statement saying: "This new app has been the culmination of months of work by our fantastic Android team to re-build our Android app, focused on notification improvements, increasing stability and performance, and providing a solid platform for the long roadmap of great new features we have planned. Full notifications support, is a significant improvement-one we'll build on to provide more amazing notification features soon."

The last rumor we had to report on about AMD was the exciting new HBM-based, 4096-bit wide memory bus Radeon R9 390X, but now we're going to tell you a little about the lower-end cards that will most likely find their way to consumers in the first half of 2015.

These new cards will reportedly be AMD's new MXM-based GPUs, arriving as the Litho XT and Strato PRO. These two new mystery cards have just reached Zauba.com, with the Litho and Strato most likely standing for the space-driven names of Lithosphere and Stratosphere. Starting with the Litho XT, which will be a Type A MXM GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, while the bigger Strato PRO will be a Type B MXM GPU with 4GB of RAM.

The XT side of things will be the powerful card, while the PRO will have a cut die. We could also see a Strato XT in the future, but we won't know anything until the new rumors start floating online.

One of Google's more interesting initiatives, is Project Loon; giant, helium-filled balloons that fly through the stratosphere providing Internet access to those below. Since Google has been flying Project Loon in our skies, they've learned quite a bit about running them more efficiently, and how to keep the balloons in the air for extended periods of time.

Over the last 12 or so months, Project Loon balloons have travelled over 3 million kilometers, which is the same as going around the world around 75 times. The problem is, they could only stay in the air for a certain period of time before Google needed to bring them back down to the ground to be re-deployed. Loon balloons are now capable of staying in the air for up to 10 times as long as they could last year, and stay there for around 100 days, or just over three months.

The current record Google has for Project Loon staying in the air, is 130 days, with the extended fly-time due to "hundreds of discoveries" that have helped the company prevent leaks, and assisted with automating the manufacturing process. Google has new auto-fill equipment that drops fill times to just under five minutes, as well as the ability to launch some 20 balloons a day as the company improves its "ability to launch consistently at scale".

Just when you thought your GbE, or Gigabit Ethernet connection was fast with 1Gbps, and its lame, old wires - light-based communications are now coming into play and could blow away current physical line speeds.

Harald Haas, Chair of Mobile Communications at the University of Edinburgh said that the potential for wider bandwidth and quicker response time than Wi-Fi, is with light-based communications. He said: "All the components, all the mechanisms exist already. You just have to put them together and make them work". Haas is working with researchers from many different universities, which are currently half way through an expensive $9 million project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, in the United Kingdom.

The researchers are looking into ultraparallel visible light communication, which uses "multiple colors of light to provide high-bandwidth linkages over distances of a few meters", as the Spectrum IEEE site reports. This system has the team using commercially-made red, green and blue LEDs as both emitters, and as photodiodes to detect light. Using this simple technology has speeds of 110Mbps, and when transmitting data in one direction only, they reached 155Mb/s.

Sony is aiming for 1080p at 60FPS for PlanetSide 2 when it lands on the PlayStation 4, but this might be a hard task thanks to the constraints of the Accelerated Processing Unit, or APU, inside of the PS4.

Sony Online Entertainment, the developer behind the game, is having some trouble with the CPU side of the APU. The team is trying to get more on-screen action happening, while maintaining the 60FPS frame rate, but the CPU is the bottleneck. PlanetSide 2 will be released onto the PS4 next month, with the developer doing some last minute tweaks to get the game hitting 1080p at 60FPS.

The Creative Director on the project, Matt Higby, talked with Eurogamer that the game is constantly being optimized, with the real bottlenecks in the development process being on the CPU side of the PS4s APU, and not its GPU. He said that the GPU side of the AMD-powered APU isn't getting hit as badly, with the GPU handling the graphical side of things well, but the CPU is dragging its heels with the frame rate and the amount of on-screen activity. Higby said: "Our real bottlenecks are on the CPU side. From a graphical fidelity perspective, people will be impressed with what they see on the PS4. That's always one of those things people are skeptical about. I see every time we post an article like this I always get called out: 'haha, it's bullshit he's saying it's going to look as good.' It really does".

Numerous data breaches throughout 2014 forced American consumers to be more vigilant and proactive of their own personal accounts. As shoppers head online and into local stores to purchase Christmas gifts, more security experts are providing a friendly reminder to look after their own financial safety.

A recent survey found 55 percent of shoppers will head to a local store or mall to purchase items, while 36 percent will be searching for and purchasing gifts online. Specifically, 55 percent of consumers will use their credit cards, and 24 percent will use debit cards, checks, mobile payments, and other forms of payments to make purchases.

"Unfortunately, the threat of fraud is a reality, but it doesn't mean you're helpless," said Phil Hatfield, Capital One Vice President of Fraud. "Ensuring that you're monitoring your accounts and getting alerts to make you aware of unauthorized activity are simple steps and things you should do year-round and especially during the hectic holiday shopping season."

Retailer GameStop wouldn't mind seeing the aging Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles receive a price cut, as gamers largely choose the next-generation Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles. Analysts believe both manufacturers should slash prices on both platforms, but nothing has been promised.

However, even with no price cuts imminent, GameStop doesn't believe Xbox 360 and PS3 hardware and software sales to simply drop completely off a cliff.

"We think it would be excellent and definitely would increase the sell-through rate on the old-generation consoles," said Tony Bartel, GameStop President. "We definitely think that would help. Year to date in the US, Xbox 360 and PS3 software and hardware are down 57.8 percent on a dollar basis. That's clearly significantly more than we anticipated at the beginning of the year."

Sony doesn't believe its PlayStation Network was hacked, despite a recent report from a hacker group that they "released a log of customer logins" of usernames and passwords for PSN, Windows Live and Origin. It's possible the user logins were repurposed from previous security breaches, so it would appear gamer PSN accounts are still secure.

"We have investigated the claims that our network was breached and have found no evidence that there was any intrusion into our network," Sony said in a statement. "Unfortunately, Internet fraud including phishing and password matching are realities that consumers and online networks face on a regular basis. We take these reports very seriously and will continue to monitor our network closely."

Even though data breaches are something consumers are increasingly more aware of, there also has been an increase in the amount of fake reported attacks.

The rise in popularity of e-cigarettes in the United States and Western Europe has led to the potential of malware infection from e-cigarettes made in China, according to recent reports. Cybercriminals have become more creative in their attempts to compromise devices, and ensuring devices from Chinese production facilities are pre-loaded with malware has become increasingly popular.

"The Made in China e-cigarette had malware hardcoded into the charger, and when plugged into a computer's USP port the malware phoned home and infected the system," according to a report posted on Reddit.

Trend Micro security consultant Rik Ferguson seems to agree with the assessment: "Production line malware has been around a for a few years, infecting photo frames, MP3 players and more. For consumers it's a case of running up-to-date anti-malware for the production line stuff and only using trusted devices to counter the threat."

Encryption and security was a big part of the push toward Android 5.0 Lollipop, with the first version of Android that enables Full Disk Encryption (FDE) by default on new devices.

AnandTech has now discovered that this forced security actually kills read/write performance on some devices, testing a Nexus 6 with some benchmark numbers to prove it. The benchmarks, below, are using AndEBench, where FDE has a really bad hit on performance. When FDE is enabled on AnandTech's Nexus 6 smartphone, random read performance drops by 62.9%, while random write speeds slump by 50.5%. That's not the worse of it, where sequential read speeds are hit by a huge 80.7% drop in speeds.

FDE is only enabled by default with devices that ship with Android 5.0 Lollipop, so if you're upgrading to Lollipop, FDE isn't enabled by default, thus you're not affected by these slowdowns. When FDE is enabled, all writes to the flash are encrypted before before being saved, and then decrypted when they're being read and sent to RAM. Worse yet, are those who enable FDE with it requiring a key to decrypt, which is protected by a lockscreen password. This means people who opt out of the passcode on the lockscreen, still experience the performance hit on their Lollipop-powered device, without the benefits of FDE's encryption.