Facebook strongly denies allegations that it handed over user data to the Turkish government in relation to the ongoing protests currently taking place in Turkey. Facebook notes that they rarely provide any user data to Turkish law enforcement or government officials, with the only exception being if there appears to be an immediate threat to life or a child.

Reports of Facebook providing Turkish officials with user data stemmed from an NPR report that cited a Turkish minister. He claimed that Facebook was "in cooperation with the state" and that Twitter refused to supply user data. Facebook and others are worried about pending litigation that could force them to provide more data to the Turkish government. Some of Turkey's legislators have called for stronger social media use rules in light of the protests.

When Square launched a few years ago, they changed the mobile payments market overnight with their little white plastic device that you to plug in your smartphone or tablet. Now Square is setting its sights on the online marketplace as well and is attempting to compete with Etsy, Amazon, and eBay by launching its own online marketplace called Square Market.

While the step from a mobile payment gateway to a online marketplace may seem a bit odd to some, this is actually part of Square's push for the company to deliver a product that answers each aspect of online commerce. At the moment, the company has a mobile wallet for consumers, a payment app for businesses, a $300 stand that turns your iPad into a point-of-sale system and it even has a project in the works that will compete with PayPal known as Square Cash.

"Creating an online marketplace is our next step in making commerce easy for everyone," said Ajit Varma, Square's director of discovery, in a statement. "The idea behind Square Market is to make local businesses accessible to Square users nationwide. Creating a storefront on Square Market is free, and sellers can manage list items, add product photos, manage inventory and create an online profile for their businesses that the company hopes will essentially eliminate the need for sellers to have standalone websites."

Razer has just announced a new software package targeted at gamers that will allow them to turn their boring old normal headphones into a 7.1 channel surround beast. Razer Surround, according to the company, goes above and beyond existing multi-channel simulation packages by giving users a calibration system that tunes the effect for individual listeners.

The software is designed as an add-on for the Razer Synapse 2.0 software package and the company has plans to offer it for sale in 2014 for $19.99, but the company is offering a pretty sweet deal to early adopters. Anyone wishing to purchase Razer Surround before January 1, 2014 will receive an unprecedented 100-percent discount.

Razer simply asked that if you find the software useful that you donate some cash to the Child's Play charity (source #2). The software is compatible with Windows Vista and higher and provides preconfigured calibrations for all razor audio products. Custom configurations can be built to calibrate for third-party headsets and users will need to register for Razer Synapse 2.0, so an online connection is needed.

This morning, MAINGEAR announced the launch of an entirely new series of custom liquid cooled PCs. Knowing that hard-core enthusiast preferred custom liquid cooling over all-in-one solutions, MAINGEAR teamed up with EKWB to create the new EPIC series of custom liquid cooled desktop PCs.

The EPIC series is comprised of the full-tower Force and mid-sized Rush models that both feature a "BiTurbo" pump design that ensures your system stays cool in the event one pump should fail. Also present are Intel's fourth-generation Core i7 or AMD's FX processors. On the graphics side, the force model can be packed with up to four NVIDIA GTX Titans or four Radeon HD 7970, with the Rush model only featuring a maximum of two GPUs.

As with all other MAINGEAR offerings, a plethora of memory, storage, fans, lighting, and paint combinations are available. At the moment, no information has been released on pricing or availability, but you can expect the prices to be fairly stout based on the hardware specifications listed above as well as the attention to detail MAINGEAR puts into every PC it builds. On a side note, how sexy is that Corsair 900D in lime green?

Motorola's X phone just might be the most anticipated phone of the year; after all, we've been talking about it since before January. We have posted more than half a dozen leaks on the mystified X Phone and it appears that this morning we're getting our first real glimpse of what it will actually look like.

Mobile device website, Phone Arena, has reportedly received the above photo from a source who is said to be testing the X Phone on Sprint's LTE network. This leak comes hot on the heels of the official FCC documents (source #2) pointing to the phone's application for approval on Sprint's LTE network.

Surprisingly, it appears that the phone might arrive with a 4.7-inch 720p screen which is a really big letdown if true. Hardware-wise we expect a 1.7GHz QUALCOMM Snapdragon processor, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of system memory. The phone does appear to be running Android 4.2.2 and there is still no official word on a release date or pricing.

Digital Storm are back once again with a new gaming PC that will send your credit card bill through the roof, introducing the Aventum II. The Aventum II steps it up considerably, as it was built by Digital Storm's in-house team of engineers, taking ten years worth of customer requests to build the dream machine.

No off-the-shelf components chassis or cooling was used, it all had to be custom built from the ground up. Rajeev Kuruppu, Digital Storm's Director of Product Development says: "We (Digital Storm) unveiled an Aventum II prototype at CES 2013 and have been working to prefect the design since. The final product is a unique system, completely designed from the ground up featuring a bold look and packing enough power to go toe to toe with any PC on the planet."

Digital Storm's Aventum II is crafted exclusively from steel and copper, with no plastic in the construction used at all. The nickel-plated copper piping solution had inspiration from high-end automotive cooling solutions and is handcrafted, so that no two Aventum II gaming systems are identical. We have three massive 420mm radiators inside of the Aventum II, which should keep the system working beautifully, and cool.

As a huge fan of Sony's Xperia Z, I'm loving the look of their new Xperia Z Ultra, Sony's new 'phablet'. Samsung may be pushing the boundaries with a 5.5-inch Galaxy Note II, but Sony have gone for the home stretch with a 6.4-inch smartphone.

The 6.4-inch display is greeted with a beautiful 1920x1080-pixel display, which provides us with 344 PPI. Sony have jam-packed the device with multiple input methods, where you can use a regular pencil or a pen as a stylus, as well as it being a capacitive stylus. Not only is the display gorgeous, but it is running the latest and greatest System on a Chip (SoC) from Qualcomm: the Snapdragon 800.

This means we have a quad-core processor clocking in at 2.2GHz, making it the Xperia Z Ultra the first official device with the Snapdragon 800 SoC as its heart. We have Android 4.2.2 as the OS, with a revamped Sony software that will make better use of the 6.4-inch 1080p display. The Xperia Z Ultra is waterproof, like its sibling, and has 4G LTE connectivity, HD Voice as well as NFC.

A criminal gang was arrested by Shijiazhuang police in Hebei province, China, earlier this month, with the gang being arrested due to them dealing in black market organs.

One of the organs they had dealt with belonged to an 18-year-old Chinese man surnamed Zhang from Gangsu province. He ran into money troubles because of video games, and as you do, you sell a body part. He reached out to an organ dealer to sell his kidney, where he was matched up with one online. The dealer asked Zhang to go to Shijiazhuang and sign a pre-sale agreement.

This agreement includes that the sale of his kidney is of his own volition, and that all consequences and issues are his responsibility. Zhang signed it without hesitation and went in for surgery. His kidney was sold for just $6,510 - but considering the going rate of a kidney in China is $47,000 - he must have been quite desperate.

Edward Snowden is all over the news right now, but he has backed himself up well according to some reports. The NSA whistleblower (and pain in the US government's neck) has an encrypted copies of at least "thousands" of NSA documents that he has sent to "several people".

The Guardian report who first published Snowden's leaks, Glenn Greenwald, during an interview with the Daily Beast, said that Snowden "has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published. If anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives."

Greenwald has said that he personally has thousands of documents that Snowden leaked from the NSA, where he adds: "I don't know for sure whether [Snowden] has more documents than the ones he has given me. I believe he does. He was clear he did not want to give to journalists things he did not think should be published."

Saints Row IV has been refused classification by the Australian Classification Board, and one of the reasons for its ban is quite hilarious - that reason? It includes an "alien anal probe".

Saints Row IV was refused classification for "interactive, visual depictions of implied sexual violence which are not justified by context" and "elements of illicit or proscribed drug use related to incentives or rewards." What does the alien anal probe do exactly? Well, for the curious:

Sitting on a flight without Internet access feels like torture, sure it's #firstworldproblems, but my entire life is digital. So to hear that JetBlue is pushing through with their Fly-Fi service, it gets me excited for the future of air travel.

Fly-Fi is set to launch sometime before Q3, but this week JetBlue are conducting some tests with one of their Airbus A320s, which will include maneuvering the plane with some pretty unique weight loads, such as the rear center of gravity positioning you can see demonstrated in the picture, above.

Once this testing is done with, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) certification should come through, before the testing moves into the performance section. If this all goes to plan, passengers of JetBlue on Fly-Fi can expect Internet hooked up through ViaSat-1 from 30,000 feet in the air.

I voiced my opinion a few days ago about backing the OUYA console on Kickstarter and not receiving my console yet, but now we're at the stage of it hitting retail shelves - and getting to the point of selling out at a few of them.

OUYA founder, Julia Uhrman, is "pissed" because some of the Kickstarter backers haven't received their consoles yet, as she promised they would all receive their consoles before OUYA went to retail. Uhrman writes in a Kickstarter update that only the backers received: "I am pissed. Some of you have not yet received your OUYA -- and, to you, I apologize. I did not promise to ship to *most* of you before we hit store shelves. I promised to ship to *all* of you. I've been reading your comments, and we are working to solve this."

I'm still waiting - and my shipping notifications haven't changed. I e-mailed OUYA about changing my address (I moved a month ago) and it feels like I got an automated response, here is what I got told this morning:

Everyone's favorite self-destructing picture messaging service has finally developed a plan to generate revenue. As of right now, the company doesn't have any source of income other than investors, who recently gave the company $60 million in investment funds. The development, server, and operating costs have all been paid for by investment funds.

In order to become a viable company, Snapchat needs to start making money. CEO Evan Spiegel has detailed Snapchat's plans to start making money. The first part of the plan, and the one likely to be implemented first, makes use of in-app purchases. The Snapchat team has been investigating various customization options that people might be willing to pay for. This could include more photo editing tools, like Instagram's filters, the ability to modify font size, color, etc, and interface customizations. The company notes that they haven't considered allowing people to pay to save snaps.

Eventually Snapchat would like to introduce native advertising. It's worth noting that Snapchat already advertises to its own users on holidays, usually by way of an animated video with the Snapchat Ghost. Snapchat says brands can already do this provided they are friends with other users or know the handle of the users they are trying to reach.

Apple has made numerous changes in iOS 7, many of which are under the hood. One of the new features that Apple has added to iOS 7 could foreshadow future features that the iPhone will offer, much like these changes have done in the past. Specifically, iOS 7 now allows developers to detect blinking and smiles in pictures, making it easier for photo app developers to detect good or bad pictures.

In iOS 5, Apple added the ability to detect faces in pictures. This was then used by the iPhone's camera app to help with smarter autofocus and better white balance settings. It's possible that the iPhone 5S could wait until everyone is smiling or not blinking before taking a picture. It's worth noting that some Android phones already have a similar feature: they take several pictures in quick succession and select the "best" one.

iOS 7 has also brought the ability to shoot 60 FPS video, albeit at 720p video quality. The new API calls could allow app developers to create better slow-motion videos without losing some of the illusion of motion.

Intel is working very hard on a top-secret project that has the potential to greatly shake up the pay-TV market. Known as "Project Black Box," the set-top box and associated television service are poised to take advertisers by storm by paying as much as 75 percent more than traditional content providers.

Intel is able to do this because the box is said to utilize a built-in camera that will collect data on viewers' habits. Yes, you read that correctly, Intel's set-top box will record everything you do in front of your TV, and then feed that information back to its advertisers to help better target you with ads.

CNET reported today that more than 2,000 Intel employees in the Northern California, Arizona, and Oregon areas are currently testing the new pay-TV service. It is unknown when the set-top box and service will launch, but Intel does say that there will be substantial changes made to the final version such as how users navigate the system and how content is served.

Pandora, everyone's favorite Internet radio service, has just cleared 2.5 million in vehicle activations. This milestone comes as Pandora announces it is integrated with 23 car manufacturers and eight third-party stereo brands. The company says that the service will be integrated into one-third of the cars sold this year.

The milestone, while small when compared to the total number of drivers in the US, Australia, and New Zealand, does indicate that more and more drivers are choosing to adopt music streaming services over traditional radio. Spotify and Rdio have been attempting to take some of that market share, but unlike those streaming services, Pandora offers an infinite random playlist which is much more like traditional radio.

Pandora began integrating into automobiles back in December 2010 when it adopted Ford's Sync AppLink technology with its Pandora for Android app. The service is now supported in over 100 different car models from a wide range of manufacturers including: BMW, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Ford, GMC, Honda, Hyundai, Lexus, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, MINI, Nissan, Scion, Suzuki, and Toyota.

This morning, book retailing giant Barnes & Noble announced that they have decided to stop manufacturing their own line of tablet devices in favor of outsourcing production to a third-party company. This move comes at a time when Barnes & Noble is experiencing massive losses in its Nook division thanks to heavy competition from rival Amazon.

The news of the decision came via the company's fourth-quarter 2013 earnings report. Barnes & Noble said that it will now divert attention away from the hardware strategy of its Nook line and will instead focus on digital media and app sales. The company has not yet released who it is partnering with to produce the Nook hardware, but many industry insiders suspect some sort of partnership with Microsoft to be in the works.

An excerpt from the earnings report reads:

This morning, NVIDIA released the highly anticipated GeForce GTX 760 to the world. The 760 is a mid-range GPU that is said to be about 12% faster than its predecessor the GeForce GTX 660 Ti. Like it's GTX 770 and GTX 780 brethren, NVIDIA says that the GTX 760 features all the latest hardware and software features.

"For gamers seeking insanely fast performance and smooth frame rates for their favorite games, the choice is clear: NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPUs," said Scott Herkelman, general manager of the GeForce GPU business at NVIDIA. "At a starting price of only $249, the GeForce GTX 760 ushers in a new level of performance, features and affordability, so gamers can experience today's most graphically demanding titles with all the eye candy turned high. It's a great time to be a PC gamer!"

Powered by an NVIDIA Kepler architecture-based GPU with an incredible 2.3 gigaflops of processing horsepower, the GeForce GTX 760 is already dramatically more powerful than the next-generation game consoles expected by the end of the year. To satisfy gamer demands for greater customization and overclocking options, the GeForce GTX 760 includes NVIDIA GPU Boost 2.0 technology, which automatically increases the GPU's clock speed for enhanced performance, while adding temperature target and fan controls, as well as extra over-voltage headroom and optimizations for advanced water-cooling solutions.

One of the things I don't like about Samsung's Galaxy range of devices, is that they feel 'plasticy' - mainly because, well, they're made from plastic. But, the South Korean's materials arm, Samsung Petrochemical, have just signed up for a joint venture with carbon fiber specialist SGL Group.

The joint venture will see the two aim to "develop new industrial and electronic applications with carbon composite materials for Samsung and the Korean market." The company will operate under the name Samsung SGL Carbon Composite Materials, and be 50% owned by Samsung. According to the companies' recent joint announcement, Samsung SGL Carbon Composite Materials will look to "provide a stable long-term supply of carbon fiber materials for Samsung and promote its use in various Samsung products and applications such as consumer electronics, medical devices and engineering applications."

This will only be a good thing for us consumers, who will receive better-made, and better-quality devices from Samsung.

LSI Corporation announced news of the latest version of the Nytro WarpDrive and the new Nytro MegaRAID software features. LSI Nytro products provide ultra-low latency and high-bandwidth performance required for Big Data applications, hyperscale web and cloud datacenters, financial services, virtual desktops and server workloads. These flash solutions provide significant reductions in TCO through lower power consumption, less floor space and frugal IOPS-to-Watts requirements.

The flash segment has proven to be a big winner for LSI, with the delivery of over 50,000 PCIe flash cards having propelled LSI into the #2 position for the worldwide flash adapter market. The expansion of the Nytro product line includes enhanced hardware capabilities and new Nytro MegaRAID features.

Nytro Boot provides the flexibility to partition onboard flash capacity's as a boot volume. This allows the Nytro MegaRAID card to provide the essential boot-up functions, removing the need for HDDs as boot volumes. This provides a more reliable system with less downtime, power consumption, and initial hardware acquisition costs.