One of Google's more interesting initiatives, is Project Loon; giant, helium-filled balloons that fly through the stratosphere providing Internet access to those below. Since Google has been flying Project Loon in our skies, they've learned quite a bit about running them more efficiently, and how to keep the balloons in the air for extended periods of time.

Over the last 12 or so months, Project Loon balloons have travelled over 3 million kilometers, which is the same as going around the world around 75 times. The problem is, they could only stay in the air for a certain period of time before Google needed to bring them back down to the ground to be re-deployed. Loon balloons are now capable of staying in the air for up to 10 times as long as they could last year, and stay there for around 100 days, or just over three months.

The current record Google has for Project Loon staying in the air, is 130 days, with the extended fly-time due to "hundreds of discoveries" that have helped the company prevent leaks, and assisted with automating the manufacturing process. Google has new auto-fill equipment that drops fill times to just under five minutes, as well as the ability to launch some 20 balloons a day as the company improves its "ability to launch consistently at scale".

Just when you thought your GbE, or Gigabit Ethernet connection was fast with 1Gbps, and its lame, old wires - light-based communications are now coming into play and could blow away current physical line speeds.

Harald Haas, Chair of Mobile Communications at the University of Edinburgh said that the potential for wider bandwidth and quicker response time than Wi-Fi, is with light-based communications. He said: "All the components, all the mechanisms exist already. You just have to put them together and make them work". Haas is working with researchers from many different universities, which are currently half way through an expensive $9 million project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, in the United Kingdom.

The researchers are looking into ultraparallel visible light communication, which uses "multiple colors of light to provide high-bandwidth linkages over distances of a few meters", as the Spectrum IEEE site reports. This system has the team using commercially-made red, green and blue LEDs as both emitters, and as photodiodes to detect light. Using this simple technology has speeds of 110Mbps, and when transmitting data in one direction only, they reached 155Mb/s.

Sony is aiming for 1080p at 60FPS for PlanetSide 2 when it lands on the PlayStation 4, but this might be a hard task thanks to the constraints of the Accelerated Processing Unit, or APU, inside of the PS4.

Sony Online Entertainment, the developer behind the game, is having some trouble with the CPU side of the APU. The team is trying to get more on-screen action happening, while maintaining the 60FPS frame rate, but the CPU is the bottleneck. PlanetSide 2 will be released onto the PS4 next month, with the developer doing some last minute tweaks to get the game hitting 1080p at 60FPS.

The Creative Director on the project, Matt Higby, talked with Eurogamer that the game is constantly being optimized, with the real bottlenecks in the development process being on the CPU side of the PS4s APU, and not its GPU. He said that the GPU side of the AMD-powered APU isn't getting hit as badly, with the GPU handling the graphical side of things well, but the CPU is dragging its heels with the frame rate and the amount of on-screen activity. Higby said: "Our real bottlenecks are on the CPU side. From a graphical fidelity perspective, people will be impressed with what they see on the PS4. That's always one of those things people are skeptical about. I see every time we post an article like this I always get called out: 'haha, it's bullshit he's saying it's going to look as good.' It really does".

Numerous data breaches throughout 2014 forced American consumers to be more vigilant and proactive of their own personal accounts. As shoppers head online and into local stores to purchase Christmas gifts, more security experts are providing a friendly reminder to look after their own financial safety.

A recent survey found 55 percent of shoppers will head to a local store or mall to purchase items, while 36 percent will be searching for and purchasing gifts online. Specifically, 55 percent of consumers will use their credit cards, and 24 percent will use debit cards, checks, mobile payments, and other forms of payments to make purchases.

"Unfortunately, the threat of fraud is a reality, but it doesn't mean you're helpless," said Phil Hatfield, Capital One Vice President of Fraud. "Ensuring that you're monitoring your accounts and getting alerts to make you aware of unauthorized activity are simple steps and things you should do year-round and especially during the hectic holiday shopping season."

Retailer GameStop wouldn't mind seeing the aging Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles receive a price cut, as gamers largely choose the next-generation Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles. Analysts believe both manufacturers should slash prices on both platforms, but nothing has been promised.

However, even with no price cuts imminent, GameStop doesn't believe Xbox 360 and PS3 hardware and software sales to simply drop completely off a cliff.

"We think it would be excellent and definitely would increase the sell-through rate on the old-generation consoles," said Tony Bartel, GameStop President. "We definitely think that would help. Year to date in the US, Xbox 360 and PS3 software and hardware are down 57.8 percent on a dollar basis. That's clearly significantly more than we anticipated at the beginning of the year."

Sony doesn't believe its PlayStation Network was hacked, despite a recent report from a hacker group that they "released a log of customer logins" of usernames and passwords for PSN, Windows Live and Origin. It's possible the user logins were repurposed from previous security breaches, so it would appear gamer PSN accounts are still secure.

"We have investigated the claims that our network was breached and have found no evidence that there was any intrusion into our network," Sony said in a statement. "Unfortunately, Internet fraud including phishing and password matching are realities that consumers and online networks face on a regular basis. We take these reports very seriously and will continue to monitor our network closely."

Even though data breaches are something consumers are increasingly more aware of, there also has been an increase in the amount of fake reported attacks.

The rise in popularity of e-cigarettes in the United States and Western Europe has led to the potential of malware infection from e-cigarettes made in China, according to recent reports. Cybercriminals have become more creative in their attempts to compromise devices, and ensuring devices from Chinese production facilities are pre-loaded with malware has become increasingly popular.

"The Made in China e-cigarette had malware hardcoded into the charger, and when plugged into a computer's USP port the malware phoned home and infected the system," according to a report posted on Reddit.

Trend Micro security consultant Rik Ferguson seems to agree with the assessment: "Production line malware has been around a for a few years, infecting photo frames, MP3 players and more. For consumers it's a case of running up-to-date anti-malware for the production line stuff and only using trusted devices to counter the threat."

Encryption and security was a big part of the push toward Android 5.0 Lollipop, with the first version of Android that enables Full Disk Encryption (FDE) by default on new devices.

AnandTech has now discovered that this forced security actually kills read/write performance on some devices, testing a Nexus 6 with some benchmark numbers to prove it. The benchmarks, below, are using AndEBench, where FDE has a really bad hit on performance. When FDE is enabled on AnandTech's Nexus 6 smartphone, random read performance drops by 62.9%, while random write speeds slump by 50.5%. That's not the worse of it, where sequential read speeds are hit by a huge 80.7% drop in speeds.

FDE is only enabled by default with devices that ship with Android 5.0 Lollipop, so if you're upgrading to Lollipop, FDE isn't enabled by default, thus you're not affected by these slowdowns. When FDE is enabled, all writes to the flash are encrypted before before being saved, and then decrypted when they're being read and sent to RAM. Worse yet, are those who enable FDE with it requiring a key to decrypt, which is protected by a lockscreen password. This means people who opt out of the passcode on the lockscreen, still experience the performance hit on their Lollipop-powered device, without the benefits of FDE's encryption.

Acer and ASUS have been the two big manufacturers standing behind NVIDIA's G-SYNC refresh rate technology, with Acer and its 4K 60Hz G-SYNC monitor, and ASUS and its 1440p 144Hz G-SYNC monitor, but according to new reports, Acer is preparing its own 2560x1440, or QHD 144Hz G-SYNC gaming monitor.

The QHD monitor would use the same AU Optronics 'M270Q002' panel that is baked into the ASUS ROG Swift, which means it'll bring along most of its features, too. So we should see Ultra-Low Motion Blur (ULMB), 8-bit color with 16.7 million colors, a 1000:1 static contrast ratio, 350 nits of brightness, 170/160-degree viewing angles, and W-LED backlighting. Acer will provide its 'Eye Care' technology, which uses flicker free light, being better on your eyes.

We should see Acer unveil the monitor at CES 2015 in January I'd say, with a release schedule of Q1 2015.

The PC version of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is finally being shown off in the form of world-first screenshots from NVIDIA, unveiling the first 1080p in-game screenshots from the PC version of the stealth game. NVIDIA has listed "what's new" for the PC version of MGS V: Ground Zeroes, below:

Better yet, NVIDIA has side-by-side screenshot comparisons between the PC and PS4 versions of the game, which you can check out here. To be honest, the PC version doesn't look that much better, especially considering just how beefy a GeForce GTX 980 SLI setup can be versus the all-in-one APU baked into the PlayStation 4.