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Google remains an outspoken critic of mass surveillance operations by the National Security Agency (NSA), but it appears both sides were exchanging a large amount of emails. NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt exchanged emails - including personal meetings and invitations to briefings and meetings.

At least one meeting, between U.S. government departments and Silicon Valley tech leaders, was focused on Enduring Security Framework - with a focus on mobile security.

Despite the emails, Google gave the Huffington Post this statement: "We work really hard to protect our users from cyberattacks and we talk to outside experts, including occasionally in the US government, to ensure we stay ahead of the game."

The Epson Moverio BT-200 augmented reality smart glasses can now be purchased with a $699.99 price tag, and while the headset may not be stylish, could end up being a great tool for use in the enterprise space.

Epson first showed off the Moverio BT-200 during CES in January, and added intrigue by including two screens. The company says using the glasses is the equivalent of looking into an 80" HDTV right in your face, and requires a handheld touchpad to use.

"Moverio BT-200 is Epson's second-generation smart glasses and incorporate much of the feedback provided by both the AR developer and end-user communities," said Anna Jen, Epson America New Ventures/New Products Director, in a press statement. "With these improvements, Moverio BT-200 is poised to deliver an AR experience that will revolutionize workflow, training and repair in the enterprise environment."

This morning Crucial Memory announced that it has begun shipping samples of its new DDR4 modules to its partners through its new Technology Enablement Program. This program is aimed at channel partners who are actively developing and evaluating DDR4 platforms. Crucial says that this mornings announcement is the result of Micron's recent ramp-up in DDR4 module production.

"Memory is one of the biggest limitations when it comes to enterprise server environments. Many memory-dependent server applications are crucial to the day-to-day operations of a business, but they require higher densities of memory and increased performance," said Michael Moreland, worldwide product marketing manager, Crucial. "Crucial DDR4 memory enables servers to perform faster and run more efficiently than ever before, reducing power and cooling expenses along the way - essential for meeting the ever-increasing workload demands of data centers."

Self-driving cars are the future of automotive transportation, and today one of the largest vehicle manufacturers in the world has announced that it's self-driving car program has entered the public road testing phase. Volvo announced this morning that it has begun road-testing its self-driving cars on public roads, and is happy to report that the cars can now handle most of the roadway duties autonomously.

"The test cars are now able to handle lane following, speed adaption and merging traffic all by themselves," said Erik Coelingh, a technical specialist at Volvo. "This is an important step towards our aim that the final 'Drive Me' cars will be able to drive the whole test route in highly autonomous mode."

Volvo says that its near-term goal is to have a fleet of 100 of these self-driving vehicles on a 50km route in Gothenberg, Sweeden by the beginning of 2017. "That Volvo Cars' hometown of Gothenburg becomes the world's first arena for self-driving cars in everyday driving conditions demonstrates both our technological leadership and Sweden's dedication to pioneering the integration of self-driving vehicles," stated Coelingh. "This public pilot will provide us with a valuable insight into the societal benefits of making autonomous vehicles a natural part of the traffic environment."

When it comes to entertainment budgets, video games reign king in development cost with budgets routinely surpassing $100 million. In the last few years we have seen that trend skyrocket with some games costing upwards of 1/4 of a billion dollars to develop. GTA V was a prime example of this, with development and marketing costing Rockstar $256 million.

Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V may not hold the title of most expensive video game ever for much longer though. During a conference last week, Activisions CEO, Bobby Kotick, said that his company will be investing $500 million into Bungie's upcoming title, Destiny. While Bungie has already sunk $140 million into Destiny, this $500 million infusion will be used to set-forth a massive marketing push which could accelerate Destiny to more than $1 billion in sales after its launch on September 9th.

Unfortunately, for Activision to see a return on this investment, Destiny will have to sell just over 16 million copies. Activision and Bungie have entered into a 10-year publishing deal which will help Activision get a return on this investment in the long run, but will it come fast enough to make up for dwindling Call of Duty revenue? If Destiny is anywhere close to the popularity Call of Duty and Halo saw over the past decade, then it could keep both companies around for the next decade or two.

NASA takes a lot of time to kill bacteria and other contaminants on spacecraft that it sends into space. It's particularly important to kill off any bacteria that might be on a spacecraft that will land on the surface of another planet to prevent contamination. The problem NASA is having is that some of the bacteria on spacecraft are nearly impossible to kill.

In fact, some have proven so resilient that NASA is looking for new ways to kill bacteria on future spacecraft. Some of those bacterial spores can survive space and NASA fears that it might be sending life out into space away from Earth. This poses problems for future missions that may send probes to other world's.

One specific bacterium called Bacillus pumilus SAFR-032 has a high resistance to the techniques used to clean spacecraft such as peroxide treatment and UV radiation. Those spores can also survive in the vacuum of space. NASA placed these spores outside the ISS and they survived for 18 months. One of the big challenges for NASA is to develop methods of killing bacteria on smaller spacecraft that can't survive the heat of NASAs currently approved dry heat microbial reduction. Some believe that in the near term this is a moot point because bacterial exchange between mars and Earth has been going on for millennia.

The last time we heard about the GeForce GTX 880, we heard it would have 4GB of RAM - well, how does 8GB of RAM sound on NVIDIA's next generation flagship GPU? Beautiful, just as I thought.

Well, an engineering sample (ES) card has been intercepted on its way from NVIDIA's development center in India, on its way to China. The shipping manifest was found by Chinese press, with "GM204" and "8 GB GDDR5" plastered all over it. We know that GM204 is the successor to the GK104, which should pack 3200 CUDA cores, a 256-bit memory bus and a massive 8GB of RAM.

If NVIDIA is about to launch the GTX 880 with 8GB of RAM over a 256-bit bus, it must be using some very high density memory chips. Better yet, the price should be under $800. I would've liked to have seen a 512-bit bus with 8GB of RAM, but I would just be greedy there, wouldn't I?

The average cost of a data breach to U.S. companies averaged $3.5 million and is a 15 percent increase year-over-year, according to a new study conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by IBM. Each lost record reportedly cost $201 each, an increase from $188 per record in 2013, as cybercriminals find success targeting select industries.

Not only are companies finding data breaches to be more costly, but retailers need to worry about customers possibly leaving if a security issue occurs. Everything from university and medical records to debit and credit card information have value among criminals, trying to steal information which can later be exploited, sold, or traded in underground forums.

From the Ponemon press release: "As a preventive measure, companies should consider having an incident response and crisis management plan in place. Efficient response to the breach and containment of the damage has been shown to reduce the cost of breach significantly. Other measures include having a CISO in charge and involving the company's business continuity management team in dealing with the breach."

Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe was at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2014 technology conference, where he teased that the company could release a massive VR MMO that would support one billion people simultaneously.

Iribe said that the VR MMO would require "a bigger network than exists in the world today," but considering the world's biggest social network now owns the VR startup, this could be an easy achievement. Before we see a VR MMO, Oculus VR wants users to be convinced they're talking to "real" people - so we have to have the graphics and ground work laid out over the next couple of years.

As multi-rotor aircraft and First Person Viewing RC flying becomes more popular, more rules and restrictions are being applied to the hobby. This morning the US National Parks Service issued a statement that clarified its stance on unmanned aerial vehicles within its parks boarders. The National Parks Service says that all unmanned aerial vehicles (AKA: Drones) are banned from use inside any national park's boundaries.

"Drones can be extremely noisy, and can impact the natural soundscape. Drones can also impact the wilderness experience for other visitors creating an environment that is not conducive to wilderness travel," the Park Service said in a statement. "The use of drones also interferes with emergency rescue operations and can cause confusion and distraction for rescue personnel and other parties involved in the rescue operation. Additionally, drones can have negative impacts on wildlife nearby the area of use, especially sensitive nesting peregrine falcons on cliff walls."

As a person new to the multi-rotor hobby, this news hits me pretty hard. I have actually been planning a trip to Yellowstone or Yosemite and had planned on packing in my quad-copter and GoPro in hopes of documenting the trip in a unique and amazing way. Unfortunately, I will have to stick to my DSLR now, and will never be able to enjoy the majestic views of some of our nations most beautiful landscapes from the air. I would like to point out that these parks belong to every US citizen, and as such, we have rights that allow us to voice our opinion on this topic, and I will be writing my congressmen to urge them to change this ruling.

Leave it to griefers to ruin a good thing in Minecraft. Last week Denmark proudly announced the unveiling of a 1:1 scale replica of its country that was built-in Minecraft by a Danish geodata firm. The model was truly a thing of beauty and was built out of more than 4,000,000,000,000,000 blocks which equated to a file size of 1TB. Unfortunately, the firm failed to disable certain features on the server, and griefers soon began blowing up the remarkable digital replica.

"We consider that as a nature of playing Minecraft - elements are broken down and new are being created," the firm said in a statement. "Therefore we will not reboot the demonstration of Denmark in Minecraft. But occasionally we will rebuild minor areas if buildings are removed and nothing new is being created. We are very happy to see so many players around the world creating fancy nice things and have fun."

While many of you are face-palming right now, and stating obvious responses, one of the more hilarious aspects of this griefing is the fact that the destruction of Denmark was made to look like an invasion from the united states. Blocky flags were raised and some tanks even made an appearance.

As the maker and DIY movement continues to grow, so does the availability of less expensive, high-precision CNC machines. We have seen this trend already prove itself in the 3D printer market, and today desktop machining is cheaper than ever thanks to a company called Carbide 3D who launched its first Kickstarter campaign last week. The new Nomad 883 CNC Mill is designed be as easy to use as a 3D Printer, and will fit on most desktop surfaces, or to fit on top of any workbench in your shop.

"We designed the machine from the ground up to address the complaints we've heard about CNC machines - from designing our own spindle to adding automation like tool length probing and custom fixtures to simplify common job setups," said Grzesek, co-founder of Carbide 3D. "We think this is the next step in the recent Digital Manufacturing trend started by low-cost 3D printers."

Carbide 3D says that the Nomad 883 is designed to fill in the gap between huge milling machines that cost upwards of $100,000 and the more affordable desktop 3D Printers which range between $300 and $3000. The CNC Milling Machine is built with a rigid aluminum frame, and is capable of milling parts from wood, plastic, metal, foam, and wax thanks to its custom designed, brush-less spindle head. Getting your hands-on one of these awesome milling machines is as easy as a $1500 pledge on Kickstarter.

EMC World 2014 begins today in Las Vegas with a flurry of announcements from the storage giant. The most interesting announcement today is EMC's quickly expanding entrance into the software-defined storage market with the release of the EMC ECS (Elastic Cloud Storage) Appliance. For a company that has very deep roots in selling big iron, this is another strong indicator that EMC is taking the SDS market very seriously.

The ECS Appliance allows customers to create hyper-scale cloud capabilities and capacities in either private or hybrid cloud environments. The new solution combines the best features of public and private clouds at a price point between 9%-28% lower total cost of ownership (in object storage implementations) than leading public cloud offerings from Amazon or Google. The appliance is a modular, scale-out solution built on commodity hardware with up to 2.9 petabytes in a single rack, but can be clustered to exabytes.

EMC is basing many of their announcements, including the ECS Appliance, around the term "3rd Platform". This term refers to the convergence of technologies such as smartphones and mobile devices, cloud computing, social media, big data analytics, and similar technologies that are redefining workloads in modern data centers. These new applications present unique challenges in regards to security, availability, and scale. Software-defined storage solutions built on commodity hardware, such as the EMC ECS Appliance, are built to provide a solution that addresses all the technical challenges associated with the 3rd platform, but at a price point and flexibility never before offered by EMC.

Many users of Facebook have quite a love/hate relationship with the social network. They love using it to keep up with friends and family they don't get to see that often, but many hate how much data they have to share with Facebook. The social network has reportedly unveiled a new anonymous login feature that allows users to log into apps without sharing any personal information.

Along with the anonymous login feature also comes a new version of Facebook Login with improved privacy controls. The goal of anonymous login is to let the user try apps without sharing personal details. The feature is currently in testing with developers and will be rolled out to more developers in the future. It's unclear when users will gain access to anonymous login.

"Sometimes people want to try out apps, but they're not ready to share any information about themselves. For this, we're introducing a way to log in to apps anonymously. Anonymous Login lets people log in to apps so they don't have to remember usernames and passwords, but it doesn't share personal information from Facebook. People can decide later if they want to share any additional information, once they understand more about the app,"� the company said in a statement.

It is now reported that Electronic Arts is very close to signing a game streaming agreement with a U.S. base cable company Comcast. Once this agreement is signed, this would allow EA to stream many of its games via Comcast's X1 set-top box.

It is also being said that both the companies have been working on a way to stream games via EA's cloud for the past two years. This new joint business venture should be beneficial for both. Comcast wanted to provide a system were its subscribers can buy new games just like ordering a movie. Comcast is also trying to stay ahead of its competition such as Apple TV and Amazon's FireTV. Comcast X1 is a set-top box with apps interface that's deemed to the most sophisticated unit in the cable industry business. With games streaming, Comcast could most likely get an edge over its competitors.

This is Comcast's way to entice customers so that it would discourage them not to cut its services and switching to other providers or streaming service. As of now, Comcast has over 22 million subscribers in the US. If this is implemented properly, the company's set-top box will double up as a game streaming console.

NVIDIA collaborated with a US based Boutique system builder Falcon Northwest for raising money on behalf of the Philip Scholz Memorial Foundation by auctioning a custom-designed gaming PC via Ebay. The foundation is responsible for providing needs-based scholarships and promotes physical activity among the youth.

Philip Scholz was a 35-year-old graphic design marketer in NVIDIA who lost his life when he tried to save a man who was laying down on the Caltrain tracks at the Santa Clara station in January. Scholz tried to save the man, but both men were struck by the train. Back then, NVIDIA co-founder said that his heroic act resonated Scholz's consistent behaviour as he found to be confident, aggressive and a capable person.

The auction is still active. At the time of writing, the current bid stands at US $7,200 and so far 20 bids were made. There are three days left for the auction to be completed.

PayPal management fired its strategy director, Rakesh Agrawal, for making series of inappropriate tweets about his fellow co-workers. It all started when 'Rocky' Agrawal started making such tweets at around 1 am during a Jazz fest in New Orleans.

The news source points out that he referred PayPal's vice president of global communications, Christina Smedley as a 'useless middle manager' and a 'piece of shit'. The following tweets by him indicates that he may have been drunk. He then says via Twitter that 'People who should be fired from PayPal Don Christmas a pool a kick'.

Though Rakesh did delete those tweets, those messages were still up long enough for a lot of people to notice. On Saturday, PayPal tweets that it fired Rakesh Agrawal as they have zero tolerance for such behaviour.

Just when I was getting used to the idea of 8TB and 16TB SSDs, Sony comes out an teases that it is capable of storing a massive 185TB of data on a new magnetic tape material. The company can now store data at 148 gigabits per square inch, which is a massive 74 times the density of standard tapes.

Sony has said that this now represents the highest recording density for the medium, where it can now begin making tape cartridges that could store 185TB of data. Comparing this to what is currently used, the LTO-6 (Linear Tape-Open) which has a density of 2 gigabits per square inch, equating to just 2.5TB per cartridge.

The newly developed technology is made possible by Sony using a kind of vacuum thin film-forming technology called sputter deposition. This process involves shooting ions at a polymer film substrate, which produces layers of magnetic crystal particles. After which tweaks are down to sputter conditions, developing a soft magnetic underlayer on the film.

The HTC One M8 is here, but before we know any serious sales numbers on it, the smaller One Mini 2 is being teased. The shrunken down One M8 would reportedly arrive in brushed metal, silver, and gold.

The One Mini 2 would not feature the dual-sensor Duo Camera that the bigger One M8 does, and it'll also drop the dual LED flash. The metal body from the One M8 will be used once again for the smaller One Mini 2, but it won't be metal up front like the M8. There will be a plastic rim around the screen, and up the top.

HTC will be shifting around the sensors and power button, but at the end of the day it'll resemble the One M8 in many more ways. We should hear more about the One Mini 2 in the coming weeks and months.

Unreal Tournament was one of the biggest first-person shooters before the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises began taking over, but now we're hearing rumblings of Epic Games' first-person shooter making a comeback.

Paul Meegan, VP of Product Development for Epic Games suggested fans of the franchise should tune in to the UnrealEngine channel on Twitch on Thursday, May 8 at 2PM ET. Epic Games' Marketing Manager, Dana Cowley, teased us even more, posting a link to a YouTube sound clip of the iconic UT phrase "first blood".

I think if Epic Games could release a new Unreal Tournament game powered by its Unreal Engine 4 could be a real big hit, especially if it stays close to the UT roots, while changing it up at the same time. If we had some true, ground level support for Oculus Rift, we could be in for a very, very big treat. Especially now that Epic Games don't have to worry about making anymore Gears of War games since it sold the rights to Microsoft.