A story I wrote on the German government concerned over the Xbox One being a monitoring device blew up over the last 24 hours, and it seems like they aren't the only ones that are worried about the always-watching, always-listening Xbox One.

Now the head of the Civil Liberties Australia has said that the Kinect voice and video features on the Xbox One make it a "surveillance device" in people's homes. Gizmodo's Luke Hopewell says "Come on. Really?!" as if people who think that are paranoid, but the Xbox One is an always-on, always listening and watching device. The Xbox One's Kinect sensor is infrared, which means blocking it with some tape won't work, and you can't block it's microphone at all.

This would mean you'd need to physically disconnect the Xbox One from the power at the wall, to get true privacy - but the question remains, are you being 'paranoid', or do you wholly trust Microsoft (or big brother) to not be listening and watching? To continue, the head of Civil Liberties Australia, Tim Vines, spoke with GamesFix about the new always-on Kinect, saying that users should be wary of what the Xbox One is actually capable of:

A Sony employee has responded to rumors that the PlayStation 4 might implement some sort of DRM to prevent used games from being played by saying that the company hears the users. "Humbled by the outpouring of passionate PlayStation fans and their willingness to talk to us directly. Please know that we hear you," said Sony Computer Entertainment America's Nick Accordino.

Players want Sony to avoid a similar DRM scheme to that rumored to be implemented by Microsoft and the new Xbox One which requires gamers or retailers to pay an activation fee to play a used game. Sony has remained quite quiet about used games. "We are just now announcing the basic vision and strategy of PS4 and will have more information to share regarding used games later this year. But PlayStation has a long history of keeping its gamers happy and we won't make decisions that damage our relationship with them."

It sounds unlikely that PlayStation 4 would implement a DRM to prevent used games. In fact, both systems are confirmed to support used games, but the details are still unknown. We'll likely learn more from both Microsoft and Sony at E3 in just a few weeks. TweakTown will be there covering the event and you can expect to see lots of Xbox and PlayStation news.

Samsung has been on a roll lately with new product launches and this coming June 20th should be no exception. The company will hold a launch event at London's Earls Court 2 in which we can expect to see "several" Galaxy and ATIV devices unveiled.

The Galaxy brand of products needs no introduction, but many of our readers may not have heard of the ATIV brand, which is Samsung's Windows Phone line of smartphones and tablets. While not much info is available on what we might see added to the ATIV line, we most likely will see the Galaxy S4 Mini, Galaxy Active and a new Galaxy Tablet unveiled at the event.

This event comes at the end of what is shaping up to be a very busy month in the tech industry. With Computex 2013 taking place between June 4th and 8th, E3 happening on June 11th until June 13, and Apple's WWDC taking place on June 10th till 14th, the tech media world is going to be in a frenzy with all of the news stories being released.

This morning we are learning more about the cloud network that will accompany the Xbox One console. The Xbox One's cloud network will feature three consoles worth of storage and CPU processing power, for each connected device. This means that developers have a much larger canvas on which to build on.

The information comes via Jeff Henshaw, Microsoft's group program manager of Xbox Incubation and Prototyping, who recently revealed the cloud network specifications in a recent interview with OXM. "For every Xbox One console we're provisioning the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox Ones on the cloud," Henshaw revealed in a recent interview with OXM.

"We're doing that flat out so that any game developer can assume that there's roughly three times the resources immediately available to their game, so they can build bigger, persistent levels that are more inclusive for players. They can do that out of the game." Henshaw continued.

Most of the must-see movie trailers reach Apple's trailers.apple.com website first, but it looks like Apple have very quietly removed both the 1080p trailer availability, and the download option. Before this, Apple let you stream and download trailers in varying resolutions.

You could watch it in 480p or 720p, and download it in 480p, 720p, 1080p and iPod/iPhone quality. Trailers uploaded to the website after May 22 (or so) will no longer include the download ability, and can only be streamed in-browser at the low res of just 480p or 720p. It's not known why Apple are doing this, especially when they have their Retina-based MacBook Pros, that can now just stream 720p video from their own website.

If you want to read an 84-page report from the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, then check it out here. There's something that is quite shocking in this report, which is the proposal to legalize the use of malware for the goal of punishing people believed to be copying illegally.

The 84-page report also proposes that software would be installed into the systems of people that would somehow (feel free to tell us) tell if you were a pirate, and if it found out that you were, lock your system up and take your files hostage until you call the police and confess your crimes. This is actually used right now by shifty people online, when they deploy ransomware. If this even gets considered by Congress, it could be a scary future for the US and the world, if the below quote was to happen:

Here at TweakTown, we're bringing you every latest bit of information on the next-gen consoles, as that is going to be the war of all wars for technology in the coming years. We've seen the Xbox One unveiling event, written an article asking just what was Microsoft thinking, and had a massive article reporting that EA's Vice President said that the PS4 and Xbox One are a generation ahead of the fastest gaming PC on the planet.

What can trump all of this? The German government coming out and stating that the Xbox One is a monitoring device. The Federal Data Protection Commissioner for Berlin, Peter Schaar, has said "Under the heading, game device 'Microsoft pushes a monitoring device in the market. The Xbox continuously records all sorts of personal information about me. Reaction rates, my learning or emotional states. The are then processed on an external server, and possibly even passed on to third parties. Whether they will ever deleted, the person can not influence".

This isn't far fetched, as the Xbox One has a camera built-in and is built to capture and recognize the face of its users. Microsoft are pushing the Xbox One as an all-in-one entertainment system, that can be voice and gesture controlled. Consider the fact that the Xbox One can be turned on by a voice command, meaning that the microphone on the Xbox One is always listening, always waiting.

Microsoft is "confident" that the new Xbox One won't suffer from the same Red Ring of Death problem that the Xbox 360 originally suffered from. This is good news for gamers who suffered at the hands of the RRoD as it was frustrating and often just months after purchase.

Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft Studios, says that Microsoft learned a lot from the Xbox 360 launch and put it towards future Xbox products. He notes how the Xbox 360 Slim, or Trinity, had a very low rate of failure.

Rumors have made the rounds that Facebook is interested in the social mapping service. According to a Bloomberg report, Google may also be considering a Waze buyout. This is good news for Waze as the two companies would likely enter into a bidding war; it's not such great news for the companies themselves as the price will go up.

The report states that Google and others have approached Waze since the news of Facebook's talks were made public. Waze is reportedly seeking in excess of $1 billion, so it's very possible that talks fall through and Waze remains an independent company. Greg Sterlin, an analyst at Opus Research, suggests that Google may acquire Waze to prevent competition or add social features to its own Maps product:

Looking to get an iPad but don't want to pay full retail price? Check out Apple's refurbished store. In fact, just today, Apple lowered the prices on its refurbished iPads to that almost every model is now at a 15 percent discount compared to a brand-new model.

The changes, as noted by MacRumors, are as follows for the iPad mini:

For the fourth-generation iPad, changes are as follows:

Yesterday I wrote an article on EA's CTO Rajat Teneja who said that the upcoming next-generation consoles are "a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market." The article received massive feedback on Facebook, Twitter, and even made the front page of Reddit. I want to use my last article of the week to explain why I feel Teneja got it wrong.

Several commenters were very quick to point out that the APU has a speed advantage over discrete GPU's as the APU does not have to send data over a PCIe bus then back to the CPU, which adds massive latency. While it is true, I must point out that no AMD APU on the market, or being rumored, can come close to the benchmark scores put up by even one generation old flagship GPU's, such as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680. The massive number of cores combined with large amounts of RAM are just not feasible for an APU.

APU's really shine when it comes to mid-level performance in laptops, and productivity machines where the power consumption and extreme performance levels of a discrete GPU are not warranted. Don't get me wrong here, I am an AMD fan boy from way back and have to admit that I do like the APU architecture. I also have to admit, that the current APU technology is just not on a level that can compete with mid-range to ultra-high-end discrete GPU's.

Hot on the heels of its underwhelming Xbox One announcement, Microsoft has stated that it plans to continue Xbox 360 sales for the next five years with a 25 million unit sales goal for the period. With sales totaling 77.2 million units to date, that means the company will have to sell 1.25 million units per quarter until 2018.

This announcement comes via an interview with Xbox's Interactive Entertainment Business Senior VP, Yusuf Mehdi. While current sales numbers may be able to sustain those goals, Redmond is going to have trouble pushing that many units once US, UK and Asian markets see the release of the Xbox One. The company plans to bolster 360 sales with a "Huge Announcement" at the upcoming 2013 E3 show, according to the report.

Microsoft Game Studios executive Phil Spencer recently told GameSpot:

Recently Google's Larry Page took a trip to Samsung's OLED production facility and was so impressed that he agreed to a deal that secured Samsung as the official display provider for Google Glass. This news comes via The Korea Times, where an official of a parts supplier for Samsung Display said, "Samsung will supply its high-end OLED screens for Google Glass."

This statement seems to be backed up by hints dropped at a recent keynote speech given by Samsung Display CEO Kim Ki-nam who explicitly referenced Google Glass several times during his talk on the potential uses of Samsung OLED product. With recent advances in flexible OLED technology, we can only hope that we will see a bendable, hard to break screen in the production version of Google Glass.

In other Glass news, Google announced this week that the winners of its #ifihadglass contest will start receiving their headgear soon. For the rest of us, there's still about a year to go until we will be able to don the title of official Glasshole.

After selling more than 10 million units in less than 30 days, Samsung is releasing its flagship, the Galaxy S4 in several new colors, including Blue Arctic, Red Aurora, Purple Mirage and Brown Autumn. This morning we are learning that AT&T will have exclusive rights to the Red Aurora version as it did with the burgundy version of the Galaxy S3.

These new colored models feature all of the same hardware and the existing Galaxy S4 models, and it is unknown at this time as to which carriers will be getting the remaining three colors. AT&T has opened up pre-orders for the Red Aurora model and will begin shipping on June 14th.

The exclusive Red Aurora model will run you $199.99, which is the same price as existing Galaxy S4 models at AT&T, and at the moment, only the 16GB version will get the new color treatment. Personally I prefer a black smartphone, but I will admit that the brushed aluminum look of the HTC One is beginning to grow on me.

Intel are just days away from launching their fourth-generation Core processors otherwise known as 'Haswell', and now they're teasing the world by stating that Haswell-based notebooks will offer 50% more battery life than Ivy Bridge-based counterparts.

Haswell CPU's were designed with mobile devices in mind, with one of their core focuses being lower power consumption, according to Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Intel Architecture Group, Rani Borkar, when speaking in a media briefing. Longer battery life also will not be coming at the cost of lowered performance, as in idle or standby mode, Haswell chips will do even better, extending battery life to something like 20 times what Ivy Bridge products can offer.

The big question here is, is this enough for consumers to get back into PCs again? Smartphone and tablet sales have no signs of stopping, while PC sales are moving backwards, let's hope this ignites a fire under consumers' feet.

We've already had an idiotic statement by EA saying that the PS4 and Xbox One are generation ahead of the fastest gaming PC's, but now we have Microsoft saying that backwards compatibility on consoles is... backwards.

Microsoft Interactive Entertainment president, Don Mattrick, talked to the Wall Street Journal stating that there are no plans for any form of backwards compatibility on the Xbox One, where he says "if you're backwards compatible, you're really backwards". Mattrick has said that only 5% of customers play titles on a new system, and because of this, the thought of backwards compatibility was thrown away.

I don't see why Microsoft build up a multi-billion-dollar industry around the Xbox 360 (without thinking of the Xbox) and then throw all of those consumers to the side for the next-gen console. If they wanted to look like the good guy here, and they really need to right now with the various holes in their ship (Windows 8, Surface, PC sales), then they would've included full backwards compatibility for their entire Xbox 360 library.

We've looked at the specifications between the next-gen consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but it looks like the PS4 might come out as the graphical champion. The PS4 features 50% more graphical horsepower than Microsoft's Xbox One, which is a huge advantage for Sony.

Both consoles share the same AMD architecture, built on AMD's HD 7000 GCN architecture. Microsoft however, have opted for a different configuration of the GPU that includes just 12 Compute Units that provides 768 shader processors (SPs) or ALUs. Sony have powered ahead, cramming 18 Compute Units that provide a total of 1152 shader processors giving them a huge 50% lead in graphical performance.

When it comes to compute performance the PS4 is around 33% faster than the Xbox One with the PS4 capable of 1.84 TFLOPS compared to 1.23 TFLOPS on the Xbox One. Normally this would see the PS4 with better looking games, or games that aren't as efficient, but developers are working with the same AMD architecture between the consoles, so that won't be the case here. What I think we'll see is Microsoft have more tuning behind the scenes in terms of the operating system, so it might multi-task better, but the PS4 will have more grunt.

It's probably pretty obvious to most that the cat has been let out of the bag in terms of 3-D-printed guns. Once Distributed Defense posted the CAD files for the gun, there was no way they would ever be eradicated from the Internet. The file has reportedly been downloaded in excess of 100,000 times.

In an interesting turn of events, Kim Dotcom and others have blacklisted the files and removed them from their services. But, it would be nearly impossible to remove them from the various torrent sites that they have been uploaded to. The bulletin by the Joint Regional Intelligence Center obtained by Fox News notes, "Even if the practice is prohibited by new legislation, online distribution of these digital files will be as difficult to control as any other illegally traded music, movie or software files."

Microsoft's customer satisfaction rating has plummeted to levels it hasn't seen since Windows Vista was the current operating system. Most attribute this fall of satisfaction to Microsoft's new Windows 8 operating system, which has been received by consumers with much discontent.

Windows 8.1 should hopefully help customer satisfaction recover as its rumored the much-loved Start button will be making a return along with an option to boot straight to the desktop mode. Microsoft's ACSI report has consumer satisfaction at 74 out of 100. Shortly after Vista launched, it was just 73 out of 100. In 2011, Microsoft's ACSI was at 78 out of 100 and it quickly dropped to 75 after Windows 8 launched.

David VanAmburg, director of ACSI:

Now that both next-gen gaming consoles have been announced, EA has been issuing a flurry of press releases detailing games that we can expect on the consoles. Today's announcement sees Need for Speed Rivals coming to both the newly announced Xbox One and the PlayStation 4.

Need for Speed Rivals will make use of the Frostbite 3 game engine, allowing the game to use stunning graphics and continue to blur the line between virtual and real. The game is being developed by EA's newest studio, Ghost Games, and is being built with help from Criterion Games.

Need for Speed Rivals is bringing with it several new features, most interesting of which is AllDrive. The developers explain: