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OCZ has confirmed the existence of a new solid state drive, believed to be the Vertex 5. Current estimates place the launch as occurring sometime next month, though OCZ would not confirm naming or launch window. They did say that it features an updated Barefoot 3 controller and 20-nanometer NAND flash.

The Vector SSD is currently OCZ's fastest SSD and is based off of the Barefoot 3 platform. It's possible that the next solid state drive could be called something like Vector 2, but Vertex 5 makes more sense. Earlier this year, OCZ updated the Vertex 3 to use 20nm NAND flash and called it the Vertex 3.2. All other features remained the same.

Last year, OCZ had some financial troubles that resulted in mass layoffs and discontinuation of numerous product lines.

It seems that at least once a month for the past several years, the Pirate Bay has had to make moves to evade action taken against it in order to keep the ship afloat. This time the popular torrent tracking site has had to switch up its top level domain.

The change comes in the wake of Swedish authorities announcing that they will seize the current domain, thepiratebay.se. This is not the first time similar actions have been taken, with the site previously being located on the .org TLD back in 2011.

This move not only creates a dilemma for Swedish authorities, but it completely messes up all of the pending DMCA take down notices that have been filed with Google recently. Since the domain name has changed, every request that has not been executed will have to be resubmitted to Google.

If you've been looking to build yourself a NAS (network attached storage) system, then you might want to stop by Giada's new motherboard, the Giada N70E-DR. The motherboard packs an integrated Celeron C1007U processor, which chews on just 17W of power.

The motherboard can handle native RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 with data security protection and some high-performance Intel 82583V gigabit ethernet ports for some great networking speed and reliability. Also included are some smart hardware monitoring and management capabilities, which allows customers to keep a check on the health of their system.

There are six SATA ports, with two of them being of the SATA 3.0 standard. Two USB 3.0 ports are featured on the Giada N70E-DR for some speedy external connectivity. There's one DDR3 DIMM slot, and a PCI-Express x16 port for some speedy graphics if that's what you want your NAS to be capable of.

Batman: Arkham Asylum and its sequel, Arkham City, have been some of the most memorable, and most successful games of this generation. These games were developed by Rocksteady Studios - but there has now been a third game in the series announced today, Batman: Arkham Origins.

Batman: Arkham Origins will be released for the PC, PlayStation 3, Wii U and Xbox 360 - with no mention of next-generation consoles. It is being put together by WB Games Montreal, and has the game world of Origins set years before the events of the previous Arkham games. Players take control of a younger Batman, who meets many of the series' iconic characters for the very first time.

From my perspective, it looks like Warner Bros. are pulling an Activision here, with their Call of Duty series. Back in its hey day (I guess it's still there, isn't it?) it was being pushed between Infinity Ward and Treyarch - the former releasing the best COD titles, the latter selling the lesser quality titles. It made lots of money for Activision, but the entire series has been run into the ground (again, in my opinion).

Google has announced that there are now seven new countries that Google Play Music has extended into: Austria, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Portugal. This now allows users to buy music through the Google Play Store on both the web or their Android device, as well as the cloud associated with their Google account which will hold 20,000 songs for a user.

The streaming service is made available to 10 devices at a time, with the settings allowing a user to tune the authorization and deauthorization of devices. You can check it out by downloading Google Play Music from the Google Play Store.

If you're like me, you've been waiting patiently for Neill Blomkamp's second movie, Elysium. His first movie, District 9, was a smash hit, and now the director is ready to launch his second movie which is due out in August.

It also stars District 9 actor Sharlto Copley, with Jodie Foster playing a government official. The trailer above doesn't show you too much, but what it does show you is enough to impress, that's for sure. Elysium is set in the year 2159, where two classes of people that exist, the extremely wealthy (today's equivalent of the 1%) who live on a perfect, man-made space station called Elysium. The rest? They live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth.

The full synopsis, is below:

It was only at the unveiling of Sony's PlayStation 4 that third-party developers discovered there was 8GB of GDDR5 RAM inside of the machine, as they were told that the PS4 would only come with 4GB of GDDR5 previously.

These developers even received development kits before the PS4 was announced, and were still not aware of the bump in RAM until the PS4 reveal. Just Add Water's CEO, Stewart Gilray, spoke with VideoGamer.com, teasing that they're working on a mystery title for the PS4, said that third-party developers were told that the PS4 would feature just 4GB of RAM, but were very surprised when the PS4 system lead architect, Mark Cerny, announced the 8GB of RAM cranking along inside of the PlayStation 4.

Gilray told VideoGamer.com:

It's no secret, Google Street View is one of the most revolutionary products ever developed. It has changed the way we search for locations to shop, view homes for sale, and has even helped me pick out dining locations close to a hotel I stayed at in Las Vegas.

Today a design firm based out of Toronto, Teehan+Lax, has released a new and innovative way to put all of those Street View images together into a very awe-inspiring time lapse journey. The experiment has several pre-built "Hyperlapses" of things like crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, but the true awesomeness comes when you create your own Hyperlapse by selecting two points on a Google map and letting the service build a custom hyperlapse of what that road trip would look like.

Creating your own is quite simple. Just set a point A and a point B and the site will then stitch together all of the Google Street View images taken along that path. I was able to quickly create a Hyperlapse of a trip down US #1 in the Florida Keys. The actual site uses lower quality images, and a very fast frame rate to reduce load times. The entire source code is available on Github (source #3) with examples so users can create their own custom Hyperlapse engines.

Back in January at CES there was an influx of new 7-inch class Android tablets that all promised to compete with the ASUS made Google Nexus 7. Most notably was an offering from ASUS called the MeMO Pad, which was designed as direct competition for the Nexus 7.

This morning in a statement to the media, ASUS announced that it has begun shipping the $149 7-inch tablet to retail channels. Featuring 16GB of on-board storage, the MeMO Pad can add more storage via an SD card capabilities, which is something the Nexus 7 cannot do.

The MeMO Pad runs on a VIA WM8950 dual-core chip, and its 7-inch display has a resolution of 1024x600 that supports 10-point multi-touch. A 4270mAh battery provides up to seven hours of use while WiFi, Bluetooth, and a Micro USB port provide connectivity. The Android Jelly Bean powered ASUS MeMO Pad is available now in stores like Amazon, GameStop and Fry's Electronics in grey, pink and white.

Sony are poised to add system level support for their DualShock 3 controllers to their Xperia-branded smartphones. A user would be able to wirelessly connect their controllers without root or hugely complicated setup procedures, using just a USB OTG cable for the initial setup.

All you would need to do is plug the controller into your Xperia device's USB port, turn it on, enter the device settings and then just enable the controller. Once there's some talk between the device and the PC, you'll need to unplug the controller and then you'll have the ability to use it through Bluetooth.

At the moment there's no news on whether this will jump across to non-Xperia-branded smartphones, but I'm sure it'll just be time for now. Games that support a controller are obviously the way to go, but this isn't a big problem.

It has been confirmed that Austin, Texas will be getting the elusive Google Fiber. Austin, TX will be just the second city to get access to Google's super-fast 1Gbps fiber internet connection and TV service. Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri is the other city to have access to Google's fiber ISP.

It's probably not enough to draw most people to move to Austin, but it could certainly help the start-up scene. Austin, Texas is already home to the South by Southwest conference and start-ups wouldn't have to travel if they were already based in Austin.

This morning a Taiwan news station reported that the Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth, had passed away. However, we are happy to report that the Queen is alive and well. The report headline said (as pictured below): "Queen of England passes away, and we will miss her." It appears that the passing of Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was confused with the Queen.

Margaret Thatcher served the UK as prime minister from 1979 until 1990, and holds the title as England's longest serving politician, and nicknamed the "Iron Lady" because of her uncompromising politics and leadership style. As prime minister, she implemented conservative policies that have come to be known as Thatcherism.

While we at TweakTown are sad to hear of Baroness Thatcher's passing, we are happy to report that the Queen is doing just fine. In general I hold all media sources to the highest standards and as a journalist myself, I fact check everything I post before hitting that submit button.

Facebook Home, the new launcher for Android by the social networking giant, releases this Friday, and will officially be available for the HTC One, HTC One X/X+, Samsung Galaxy SIII, Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy Note II and the new HTC First.

This morning MoDoCo.com has published a set of three APK files that appear to be the components that make up a pre-release beta of Facebook Home. The only requirements for installing the beta is that the device has a maximum resolution of 1280x768, as well as the ability to completely remove or uninstall the existing Facebook app.

I was able to install all three apps to my aging Motorola Photon 4G, but all I got upon launch was a black screen. Home does not appear to actually reconfigure the home screen, but it remaps the home button to the Facebook Home wall. Pressing the back button allowed me to return to my normal Android home screen, and I was then able to delete the APKs through the normal app removal method.

Last month I reported that digital comic book startup comiXology would be offering the entire Marvel first edition catalog for free to users of its app. Unfortunately that is where the good news began and ended.

Just minutes after going live, the site was inundated with overwhelming traffic and their servers began to melt down. The site was unreachable for several days even after the download links were taken down. This lead to the CEO sending a mass email to members stating that they would get their free downloads, but for the time being, the company had to upgrade the network.

I was one of those subscribers, I tried to download several comics and failed to do so every time. This morning I received an email from comiXology that said they will begin delivering on their promise of free first editions beginning this Thursday. It appears that the process will be rolled out to members in phases and will only be accessible via a custom link that will be emailed to you.

If you're after a gigantic SSD, Crucial's upcoming M500 in 960GB might do the trick. The mammoth-sized SSD was teased a couple of months ago at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but it looks like the drive is about ready to drop.

Upgradeable.com.au has it for sale, at AU$875. This is much more than Crucial teased at CES, where they promised the "First terabyte-class drive available for under $600" But, we're also talking about an Australian retailer, so we have 10% for GST bringing the price down to under $800, and AU retailers nearly always charge more than US retailers - so $600-$650 in the US isn't much of a stretch.

What does Crucial's M500 SSD in 960GB provide? Well, you'll see some sustained sequential read/write performance of 500MB/sec and 400MB/sec, respectively. 4KB random read/writes are both up to 80,000 IOPS. The controller doing all of the work inside the Crucial M500 is the Marvel 88SS9187 controller with "Micron Custom Firmware."

We've seen leaps and bounds in graphics over the years, helped by each iteration of DirectX. But, after games started being made for, and optimized for consoles, the push of graphics started to sink.

It has gotten to the point where AMD's vice president of global channel sales, Roy Taylor, stated during an interview with German publication Heise.de, that AMD don't believe we'll see a DirectX 12 API. We won't be seeing DirectX 12 with Windows 8, or Windows Blue either.

Taylor was responding to a question about next-generation GPUs and technologies that they can be built around, where Taylor replied they'd normally build them around new DirectX versions to help the next-generation GPU architectures, but there won't be a DirectX 12, which means AMD's next-gen GPUs will integrate other technologies.

Reuters is jumping out of the gate, with fresh news that former News Corp president, Peter Chernin, who now runs The Chernin Group, has made a $500 million bid to buy Hulu. We heard that Hulu jammed a 'For Sale' sign into their front garden a few weeks ago, but this news is now much more official.

The Chernin Group owns stakes in Pandora Media Inc and the related production company Chernin Entertainment, who has produced films and TV shows such as New Girl, Terra Nova and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Hulu is currently jointly owned by News Corp and Walt Disney Co. Peter Chernin actually had some word in building Hulu back in 2007 when he sat on the website's board.

Reuters has reported that the owners of Hulu "reached out to potential buyers in March [of 2013] after initially contemplating a deal in which one [News Corp. or Disney] would buy out the other. It is not clear whether that transaction is still being contemplated."

The time is nearly upon us, when we get to see what the fourth-generation Core processor from Intel can do. Haswell, as it's otherwise known, has begun "shipping to customers now and will launch later this quarter" according to a source of CNET's.

Intel is expected to make a statement at the IDF Beijing conference next week, and should arrive in June for Computex in Taipei. Haswell is a special chip, as it is a next-generation processor that will scale incredibly well, from Ultrabooks to smart devices, right up to the high-end desktop and more. Intel CEO, Paul Otellini, has said that Haswell's new micro architecture will deliver "the single largest generation-to-generation battery life improvement in Intel history."

The chipmaker has confirmed the USB bug attached to chipsets, known as errata, will be "in production" during the initial ramp which happens later this month:

It looks like Acer is preparing a new form-factor tablet, something that will compete with the popular iPad mini among other smaller slates. Acer's Iconia A1-810 would feature a 7.9-inch IPS panel with a resolution of 1024x768.

This display slaps it right on iPad mini territory, but loses out to the Nexus 7 ever so slightly. We should expect Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, an 1.2GHz MediaTek MT8125 ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core processor. The usual suspects will also make an appearance, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS. The A1-810 also features an micro HDMI port, 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, VGA front-facer, and a 3250mAh battery.

1GB of RAM will be included, as well as 16GB of on-board storage. The Acer Iconia A1-810 weighs 460 grams and measures in at 208.7 x 145.7 x 10.5 mm. We should expect a price of around $250 and it should ship sometime in June.

What was originally thought of as a huge April Fool's Day joke has turned into an actual serious tease of the upcoming Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon from Ubisoft. A bunch of screenshots have made their way to the official Xbox.com website, which has gamers talking.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon goes down a very different path to the usual DLC, where we should expect some seriously fun first-person shooter fun. Here is the official synopsis from the game's website: