Written in conjunction with Simon den Bekker

Counter-Strike Global Offensive has a strange internal economy that's driven in large part by the weapon skins created by the community. It also attracts a lot of attention and players to the game. In essence, it's the backbone of the game, a reason why people play. To have these digital works of art and display them in-game. These player-contributed and professionally contributed works of art (and sometimes non-art) are sometimes a source of great pride among players, as they compare and compete in order to win or open a case with an expensive and sometimes beautiful looking weapon skin. Also, people can make money from these.

Valve oddly makes betting incredibly easy in the game itself. One can buy cases that have randomly won weapons upon opening, which the keys to open also cost money. Those weapon skins can be easily transferred to third-party pools, or websites, to be either sold or put into a 'pot' to be won by betting on different professional and semi-professional CSGO matches. There is a wide variety of websites that offer ways to use your weapon skins as collateral, and currency, to gamble and place bets.

Someone has integrated an actual, working electrocardiogram onto a small business card. You heard right, a company called MobilECG has done something startlingly clever, giving the diagnostic power to everyone. And it's an open-source design that anyone can play with.

The card uses sensors built into it that measure the electrical signals created by the heart through your thumbs. It's not quite the most accurate way to do it, but as a first-line diagnostic tool when you're not quite feeling well, it might be a life-saver. A blog post from the company says that it should be accurate enough to provide cursory information from the P, Q, R, S and the T waves to prompt people to go to the hospital.

The innovation coming from different startups for integrated and smaller technology is just astounding. Just imagine where medical devices can go if something like this is just on the boundary of our imagination. At the moment, they're gauging interest in their product, and you can request one if you'd like. They'll sell you one for $29, or less if more people start showing interest.

Pirating just became a whole lot easier thanks to the Internet. A group of sea-going pirates were able to hack into the content management system of a shipping company to pinch the shipping manifests and schedule to better plan their brazen heists.

According to a new security report by Verizon, the Internet, and hacking in general, is becoming an ever increasing resource for the seafaring thieves. Based on the evidence, however, it appears that the pirates themselves are carrying out the attacks because of the sloppy way in which they're going about it. It's proven easy to trace the activity completely to its source.

Pirating is evolving. It once was a primarily physical activity, but now they're becoming more efficient and careful. Why waste resources physically looking for ships on the open sea when you can just track precisely where they'll be by taking a look at the schedule. It's a bold move, especially when they don't seem to care that they get caught. Their mobile nature makes that point moot anyhow

As a die-hard fan of the Diablo ARPG series, I'm incredibly excited to report that Blizzard may be making a new chapter of the landmark franchise.

A batch of new job listings pretty much confirm that a new Diablo is in the works, with Blizzard hiring a senior concept artist, a lighting artist, and a senior character artist for an "unnannounced project". Blizzard pretty much gives it away by explicitly stating that the ideal candidates will be responsible for molding the Diablo universe.

"Blizzard Entertainment is seeking exceptionally skilled and passionate senior concept artists to help drive the vision of characters and world's in our next hit game! We're looking for artists that are self-starting, versatile, and enjoy being part of a collaborative environment. The ideal candidate shares our sensibilities, loves dark medieval world's, and feels there are countless stories left to tell in the Diablo universe!"

An adrenalin charged trailer for Io Interactive's upcoming Hitman was just released, and it shows off some of the settings and missions we'll be exploring when it releases on March 11th.

The first "season" as they're calling it is going to have a variety of very different and engaging missions to go through. Agent 47 is back and in the prime of his career in this new, live and almost re-imagined game. The amount of free-will and choices you'll have should be astounding. Even the beta, as short as it was, had a great many possibilities in how to accomplish it.

The episodic way that they're releasing this will give you new, fresh contracts and challenges to complete every week as well as new, major content appearing every month until the season ends. The plan for them is to continue to support the game with fresh content for quite some time. The base-mechanics are already in-place, and they're pretty good.

Acer has a number of awesome gaming monitors under their belt, with the 27-inch 4K monitor in the form of the XB280HK, as well as my personal favorite and current workstation and gaming display - the Predator X34 (34-inch 3440x1440 w/NVIDIA G-Sync).

Well, Acer has done it again by unveiling their new Predator XB321HK, a new 32-inch 4K gaming monitor. The new Predator XB321HK features a 32-inch 4K panel with 100% sRGB coverage, 178-degree viewing angles, 10-bit color and NVIDIA's G-Sync technology. Acer also notes that the Predator XB321HK features 4ms response time, 350 cd/2 maximum brightness, and dynamic mega-contrast ratio.

Acer also has its EyeProtect feature which reduces blue light emissions, and its GameView technology which dynamically adjusts the display to the type of game you're playing. The Acer Predator XB321HK has DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI connectivity as well as a USB 3.0 hub and is priced at $1299.

Steam is an oft-hacked platform for a number of reasons. The internal economy and lack of proper controls for trading the strangely valuable items makes it a very sweet target for scammers and hackers alike. Valve is committed to helping stop that from happening and is rolling out some new ways to help prevent you from outright losing your inventory.

On March 9th, a Steam update will add a number of new features to the trading mechanism to make it more difficult for scammers to steal from their intended victims. These changes are in response to the nearly 77,000 accounts that tend to be hacked or otherwise compromised in some fashion each month.

And for goodness sake, use Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator, it's relatively easy to setup and it helps tremendously. 2FA is a very effective tool in preventing both hacking as well as enabling a safer and more effective trading environment.

Star Wars has been a very successful franchise for EA this year with Battlefront alone having shipped more than 13 million copies worldwide since it released. Star Wars: The Old Republic has seen a revival in its player base thanks, in part, to a return to the highly successful narrative driven gameplay they reintroduced with the Knights of the Fallen Empire. Galaxy of Heroes, too, has been a smashing success.

And now EA wants to start teasing what they're planning on doing next with the franchise. During the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco, the companies CFO, Blake Jorgensen, talked elusively about how they plan on moving forward. "We've got a couple of things up our sleeve that we haven't talked about yet but you'll probably see them teased over the next six months," Jorgensen said. We already have an idea about the direction they're headed, with an Amy Hennig directed open-world RPG and even potential sequels to Battlefront itself.

The strong sales of Battlefront, regardless of the actual numbers of people playing at any given time, has show EA just how strong a franchise it can be for them, hopefully something that'll resonate and help to invigorate the development of well thought-out games that are true to the spirit of Star Wars.

Western Digital has just announced that it has expanded its internal and external storage solutions, now offering huge 16TB external storage solutions for professionals on-the-go, or those who need serious amounts of backup at home or work.

WD will be launching a slew of new HDDs throughout the first half of 2016, which will include their My Cloud personal storage devices, My Book external HDDs, as well as the internal WD Red, WD Red Pro and WD Purple HDDs. All of these drives will offer "purpose-driven engineering and HelioSeal helium-technology with the new 8TB drives for maximum and efficient performance in the applications for which each model is designed". VP of Product Marketing for WD, Brendan Collins, explains: "We are committed to integrating high-performance, high-capacity and high-quality drives into all of our solutions. No matter what market or application, we have a solution - whether it's for small businesses, channel partners, enterprises or end-users. Our goal is to deliver the best and most competitive solutions on the market".

As for the HDDs that will be bumped up to 8TB or 16TB (with 2 x 8TB HDDs in RAID 0), it'll include:

In a move that certainly surprises no one but disappoints everyone, EA has officially confirmed that Mass Effect: Andromeda won't be releasing in 2016. The "best and largest ever" Mass Effect game will instead be releasing in the first quarter of 2017, which is from January 1 through March 31, 2017.

During a presentation at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen detailed the company's roadmap for 2016 and beyond. "We've got a great year ahead... we've got our Battlefield first-person shooter game coming in the third quarter, and our third-party title that Respawn, our partner, built, it's called TItanfall, it's the second title that they brought into that brand. We have our Mirror's Edge runner game this first quarter, and then we have Mass Effect, which is a sci-fi action game, in our fourth quarter. So big year ahead and we're pretty excited."

As EA's fiscal year begins with Q1 on December 15 and ends in Q4 on March 31, we can surmise that ME: Andromeda will be out by March of next year. Not so long ago we predicted that Andromeda would be delayed due to the departure of key talent, including Senior Development Director Chris Wynn and lead writer Chris Schlerf.