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Plextor, a developer of digital storage technology, announced the launch of the M6S, an efficient, high-performance SSD. According to Plextor, the new M6S is capable of delivering random read/write speed of 94K IOPS/80K IOPS and a 520/440 MB/s sequential read/write speed. Compared to the best-selling M5S, there is an additional power savings of 30% to 50%.

The M6S will come in a thinner 7 mm form factor, allowing it to fit into thin notebooks. Availability of the new drives begins in the second quarter of 2014 with 128 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB capacities.

Check back on April, 10th 2014 to see the TweakTown review of the M6S.

You might remember the name 'CliffyB' as one of the brains (now ex-brain) of Epic Games. Cliff Bleszinski took to his Tumblr to talk about the recent acquisition of Oculus VR by Facebook: "The brain droppings of a formerly employed videogame ninja". CliffyB seemed to think it was going to happen, where he said: "this is exactly what was going to happen". He explained in much more detail:

It gets better, as the founder of Epic Games took a swipe at Oculus VR's Kickstarter backers - who are after Oculus VR's blood - saying that investing in a Kickstarter project guarantees you a reward, and now equity and that "crowdfunding can only take you so far, especially when you're doing something this ambitious". He also took a big swipe at Minecraft creator Notch, where he said: "Notch, your cancelling Minecraft makes you look like a pouty kid who is taking his ball and going home. It's a bratty and petty move and it saddens me greatly".

Well, it looks like the military is having some fun above the skies of Texas, where defense technology blog Ares is reporting on a mysterious, unidentified flying object flying over the skies of Amarillo, Texas, back on March 10.

Bill Sweetman, Aviation Week's defense experts is perplexed, but he is convinced it's real. "Three of us here-myself, Graham Warwick and Guy Norris-concur that the photos show something real. Guy and I have known Steve Douglass for a long time, and know that the reason that he sees (and monitors by radio) unusual things is that he spends time looking for them. Here is Steve's account of one of his better radio intercepts. This is more than a random image.

The photos tell us more about what the mysterious stranger isn't than what it is. The size is very hard to determine, for example, although the image size at contrailing height suggests that it is bigger than an X-47B. However, the basic shape-while it resembles Boeing's Blended Wing Body studies or the Swift Killer Bee/Northrop Grumman Bat unmanned air system-is different from anything known to have flown at full size, lacking the notched trailing edge of Northrop Grumman's full-size designs".

Mayim Bialik isn't just a leading cast member of the hit CBS show "The Big Bang Theory," she's also a neuroscientist and strong advocate for helping develop science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) interest in the United States. Bialik plays the role of "Amy Farrah Fowler," a neurobiologist, enjoying her time studying animals as part of her research.

Bialik continues to strengthen her leadership in driving interest in US STEM programs, especially for women trying to break into the field.

"Right now, research shows that more than half of high school freshmen who declare interest in STEM-related fields lose interest by the time they graduate," Bialik recently told TweakTown. "For female students, the problem continues into college. One-third of women who enter STEM bachelor's degree programs switch their major to a non-STEM field by the time they graduate,"

Kim Dotcom is one of those people that I liken to the gunslingers of wild west legend, or something like Zoro or RobinHood even. Even though he faces very serious allegations that could land him in prison for quite a long time, he never gives up and continues to champion for internet freedom, and net neutrality.

Dotcom's latest venture is not a new file-sharing website, or even attempting to dominate the latest first person shooter style video game. In fact, Dotcom has decided to move into a more political world where he can influence the path that government's take when it comes to internet legislation. Today Kim Dotcom officially launched the new political party which he named the "Internet Party," and has released a few videos detailing the party's new mission, and goals.

"The Internet Party was founded on the spirit of the Internet, to get an open, free, fair, connected and innovative society," the party said on its website. "A party that will give you faster, cheaper Internet, create high-tech jobs, protect your privacy, and safeguard our independence." Check out the videos above and below to find out exactly what the Internet Party is all about. The Obama impersonator is quite amusing I must say!

There is nothing more I hate in this world that someone who cheats at online games such as Battlefield 4, Call of Duty, or any of the FPS shooters. The latest blockbuster to hit the FPS gaming world, Titanfall, has a solution for this. Over the last few weeks, Respawn Entertainment has been silent and letting cheater cheat so they could collect data on what could be hundreds of cheaters, and has just now implemented a fix that will take these players out of the general population.

If you get caught cheating in Titanfall, you will not be banned from the game, but rather placed on a special blacklist that will only allow you to play on maps populated entirely by other cheaters. The segregation from legitimate players began this past Friday, and those caught saw a "FairFight: Cheat Detected" message pop up on their screen while inside the private lobby interface. Respawn included a contact email for those who feel they were incorrectly flagged to use, but users will have to prove they have not cheated.

Even though cheaters are banned from public servers, their non-cheater friends can still play with them though, but the match will have to take place on the isolated, cheater friendly servers. For now, the anti-cheating system is limited to the PC as it is the easiest platform to enable cheating on. While I despise cheaters to the core, I feel that this is the best solution possible for removing cheaters from the game, and could prevent those huge kill to death ratios we often see from cheaters.

Companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google have the task of operating and maintaining some of the biggest websites on the internet, and due to not only the amount of content they host, but the massive number of user accounts they must keep up and online at all times requires a massive database. These three companies have teamed up to create the perfect database designed to scale to massive proportions.

Facebook along host one of the largest MySQL database deployments ever built and as the service continues to grow, a vanilla distribution of Oracle's MySQL was just not cutting it, so Facebook teamed up with Google, LinkedIn and Twitter to develop a MySQL alternative, WebScaleSQL, that was both scalable and robust enough to keep the social networking empires running for the foreseeable future. WsSQL is built with collaboration in mind and speed in mind, and allows database engineers from different companies to work together to create the best database possible.

"Our goal in launching WebScaleSQL is to enable the scale-oriented members of the MySQL community to work more closely together in order to prioritize the aspects that are most important to us. We aim to create a more integrated system of knowledge-sharing to help companies leverage the great features already found in MySQL 5.6, while building and adding more features that are specific to deployments in large scale environments," Facebook said in the company's developers blog. "In the last few months, engineers from all four companies have contributed code and provided feedback to each other to develop a new, more unified, and more collaborative branch of MySQL."

The "Coinkrypt" malware is making its rounds, infecting Google Android devices, letting cybercriminals mine Litecoin, Casinocoin and Dogecoin courtesy of hijacked devices.

Most malware today is designed to either steal information or create some type of financial incentive for criminals - and Coinkrypt follows that same strategy, but with a rather unique twist.

Although it isn't prevalent at the moment, security researchers want users to be aware of the potential ramifications if they are infected - including potentially causing batteries to drain faster - or eventually leads to overheating.

There are a huge number of movie theaters around the country today. Many of them show 3D films and a few of them have large format IMAX screens. A new type of theater is heading to LA this summer called 4D and it uses something known as 4DX technology. Rather than showing a larger image or a 3D image on the screen, 4DX brings some new features to the real-world.

A 4DX-equipped theater has seats that move and vibrate along with the action on the screen. That's not all it offers, the theater can also reproduce rain, wind, strobe effects, and fog along with smells that go along with the movie. I would think that it would be very hard to pay attention to the film while it was raining in the theater or you were surrounded by fog.

The very first 4D Theater in the US will be installed in LA this summer. It will be at the Regal Cinemas LA Live Stadium 14 in downtown LA. The company behind the theater tech is from South Korea and is called CJ Group.

GTC 2014 - At the GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA unveiled a few new technologies that could see us in a world of 8-way GPUs in consumer PCs within the next couple of years.

Right now, the limitations in place in the form of chipsets, PCIe bandwidth and power consumption simply don't allow this to happen. Starting with NVLink, which promises some impressive tech - such as 5-12x the bandwidth of PCIe, it could happen.

Then we have 3D Memory, another technology which could enable 8-way GPUs. We have incredibly fast memory bandwidth, much faster than what is available today, and it will only get better, and especially as it has 400% better energy efficiency.

You don't have to go far to see someone walking around and texting on their iPhone. you also don't have to wait long to see some of these people run into something or someone while looking at their phone instead of what's going on around them. Apple has a patent application that shows a system called transparent texting.

The idea is that the rear camera of the smartphone would be used to grab a live video image of what is behing the smartphone. That way the person texting and walking could see what is behind the phone as they move around. Naturally, this would require the person texting to hold the phone straight up in front of their face.

Most of the people I see are walking and looking down at the phone. In that instance, having what is behind the phone in the background behind a text conversation would do no good. The Apple patent app was field with the USPTO on Thursday of this week according to reports.

If you are old enough to remember the 80's, you will recall the giant boom box radios that people carried around to listen too. Those things ate more D-cell batteries than a decent family could afford. Pyle Audio has announced the launch of a new product called the Street Blaster that is a modern interpretation of a boom box from the 80's.

You don't get dual cassette decks in this thing. What you do get is Bluetooth, a guitar input, NFC tech, a rechargeable battery, and a 1000W amp. Pyle doesn't say how large the battery is, but I have to wonder with that much power and wireless features just how long the battery will last.

If you have a device that doesn't support playback via Bluetooth, the Street Blaster does have a 3.5mm input. It also has a microphone input as well. I would assume that to mean you can hook a mic to it and use it like a PA system.

LG unveiled a new smartphone last month at Mobile World Congress called the G2 Mini. The smartphone is a solid mid-range offering that was promised for a global launch this month. This week marked the launch that mid-range device.

The G2 mini has a 4.7-inch screen and a nice 2440 mAh internal battery that is removable. Removable batteries are a big deal for smartphone users who spend a lot of time on the phone and away from an outlet. With a removable battery, you can swap batteries and keep working.

The phone uses a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm processor and has 8GB of internal storage. The resolution of that 4.7-unch screen is 960 x 540. The Qualcomm processor is paired with 1GB of RAM and the G2 mini has a memory card slot for storage expansion.

If you are a big twitter fan, the service has announced some updates that will make it a bit more social. On networks like Facebook, you can attach multiple photos to your posts and tag people in the photos that you want to see it. Twitter hasn't had that capability.

In the past, it was one photo per tweet and if you wanted someone to see it, you had to use the trusty "@" to do the trick. Twitter announced this week that it was adding two new features that will change all that. The new features include the ability to tag people in photos that you are posting and put multiple photos in a single tweet.

Twitter also now supports up to four photos in the tweet. The cool part about support for photo tagging is that you can tag up to ten people in a single image and not use any of your 140 characters to do it. If you are tagged in a photo, you will receive a notification.

Just when it seemed that eBay has finally stabilized their ever changing fee and user structures, Australian users have been slugged with an additional new 10% postage charge in an email sent out to registered users earlier today.

Under the auspices of the otherwise innocently named "Changes to the fee structure", from May 6th sellers will now be charged a flat 9.9% fee on the price of all goods sold, including the price that sellers charge for postage. Whilst eBay are continuing to encourage sellers to not charge buyers for postage, TweakTown has spoken to a number of sellers disgusted to eBay's latest fee hike, whom have indicated that they will have no choice but to charge higher rates for postage to compensate for this charge.

Some have indicated that this change will unfairly target Australians in favor of overseas sellers, whose cost of shipping goods is negligible, compared to the rising costs of shipping goods via Australia Post.

In a double whammy, the Fareit Trojan targeting Microsoft Windows PCs also has been found to spread the Cribit ransomware, as security researchers transition to defend against sophisticated cyber threats.

There are two versions of Cribit in the wild - one version encrypts files on the infected PC and shows an English ransom, while the other version has messages also available in Chinese, French, Arabic and Spanish, researchers note.

"After all, cybercriminals are after one goal: to get a person's money," said Christopher Budd, Trend Micro threat communications manager, in a statement to SC Magazine. "Returning/decrypting a victim's files won't certainly be a priority or major concern for these people. Additionally, paying the ransom may encourage and help expand the operations of cybercriminals."

Leaks are something everyone has come to expect when it comes to new mobile devices that are preparing for launch. Take the recently launched HTC One M8 for example, the device was leaked several weeks in advance, and almost every single rumor and leaked imaged turned out to be 100-percent accurate. While companies like HTC and Samsung may not care much about early leaks, BlackBerry appears to not only care, but putting a plan into action to snub would-be leaksters before they have a chance to divulge product information.

BlackBerry's CEO, John Chen, said that he is no longer taking leaks of the company's products lightly, and anyone caught leaking images, products, or any IP will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. While he did not mention what recent leak has him so fired up, we suspect that it was the recent outing of the upcoming BlackBerry 10.3 build and a string of smaller leaks that divulged upcoming project codenames.

"One of the most frustrating things for all of us at BlackBerry is when a critical and confidential project is reported in the media before we are ready to discuss it. Leaks are, at their best, distracting, and at their worst downright misleading to our stakeholders. The business implications of a leak are seldom advantageous," Chen said in the company's blog. "This is why I want to make you aware that, right now, we are pursuing legal action against a party who stole confidential information about a future BlackBerry product and made that information public. This person falsely posed as an employee of one of our carrier partners to obtain access to secured networks."

We all know by now that the FBI, CIA and NSA request information on us from big tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, but did you know that Microsoft sends a massive invoice every time it gives away your private information? A newly released document shows that at least in one incident, Microsoft billed the government as much as $15,600 for information that was requested.

The Syrian Electronic Army hacker group has just leaked details that show Microsoft billing the US government more than $350,000 on September 5th of 2013. The invoice appears to show that more than 78 invoices for request were sent to the government, with the highest being shown set at a whopping $15,600.00.

The government agency in question is the FBI's Digital Intercept Technology Unit. The leaked documents show that Microsoft was billing the FBI more than $100,000 per month on average between 2012 and 2013, and that each individual request cost the FBI $100 during 2012 and into 2013 until Microsoft raised the price to $200 per request.

Xbox One and Xbox 360 gamers have some new apps to keep them occupied between gaming sessions. Microsoft has announced the launch of some new apps for both consoles this week. Gamers on the Xbox 360 will get access to the Major League Gaming app.

The app will allow you to watch live gaming tournaments and other content. Xbox One gamers also get access to the MLB.TV app that brings live Major League Baseball games to the console. The app requires Xbox Live Gold and a MLB.TV Premium subscription to watch the games.

Xbox 360 gamers also get access to some more movie streaming apps with the launch of Encore Play and Moviplex Play. The apps both require that you have a subscription to the networks on a participating cable or satellite provider.

Quad-copters are being used these days for everything from aerial footage of disasters, to amazing footage from inside an active volcano eruption. Today I came across a video that takes quad-copters to an entirely new level of usefulness. In the video seen below, a father is seen attaching a string to his young son's loose tooth, and then uses a quad-copter to yank the tooth right out of the kids head. I am not exactly sure if this is exciting, or terrifying, but it does make for a damned good story to tell.

Some people are calling this story a hoax, but I think it is quite real. Quad-copters of the size seen in the video are capable of lifting their own weight plus the weight of a camera setup, so I am sure this one has enough lift to yank an ill-fated tooth out of the child's mouth. I am in the process of building my own quad-copter and when finished, it should be able to lift a DSLR, Lens, and GoPro camera with ease, so something like a very loose tooth should be no issue. Do you think that multi-rotor aircraft are a viable replacement for dentist? Let us know in the comments.

The quad-copter seen in the video appears to be a DJI Phantom 2 Vision FPV, that features gimble mount for a GoPro camera for FPV video recording, so it should have more than enough lift to remove the tooth with ease. Judging by the $1200 price tag, a trip to the dentist or even a pair of pliers wrapped in a towel would have been a far cheaper solution, but where is the fun in that?