For a very long time the telephone industry has enjoyed government subsidies designed to help them roll out telephone service into rural parts of the country. The goal was to get people that live in rural America the same sort of communications tech that people in major cities get. As the years pass and fewer and fewer people use home telephone service the FCC has been working to repurpose some of those telephone subsidies.

The FCC announced a plan in 2011 that would use some of the funds from the telephone subsidies to subsidize the roll out of broadband internet access to rural America. Telephone firms pushed back hard against that change out of fear of losing subsidies. The FCC has now won the right to use some of the money from those subsidies to spread broadband in rural parts of the US. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the challenge leveled by telephone companies as unpersuasive opening the doors for re-tasking of subsidies.

"After years of good faith efforts faltered, voting to approve the comprehensive reform of universal service and intercarrier compensation continues to be one of my proudest moments at the FCC,"� wrote commissioner Mignon Clyburn. "The reforms are changing the lives of millions of Americans who will receive broadband for the first time."�

Kids love to play games on tablets and smartphones. The problem that some parents have is that many of the games available for the iPad and iPhone aren't exactly educational. Some would also prefer their kids to play with toys that aren't digital. A new series of games have surfaced from a company called Tangible Play that combines digital and real-world play for an interesting experience.

The game series has three games known collectively as Osmo for kids that are able to connect with physical toys that children can touch and feel in the real-world. The games include Newton, Words, and Tangram. The games come with a stand to hold the tablet at a specific angle and a clip that goes over the camera.

That clip directs the camera to the surface where the game is being played. The game is then able to mimic the actions kids take in the real-world on the screen of the tablet. Newton is a drawing app that can create obstacles to play a game. Words is sort of like Scrabble. Tangram is a puzzle game that lets you match the shape on the screen using flat pieces. Osmo is currently crowdfunding and needs $50,000. During funding, the game will sell for $49 with the normal street price being $99.

In a twist of fate, a game about hacking the world around you, has malware and hacks built into the illegal copy of it. The torrent of Ubisoft's upcoming open-world hacking game Watch Dogs is hiding some serious malware.

For those who are downloading Watch Dogs over torrents are finding themselves with some pretty serious malware, that makes the people who distributed the copy money through installing a Bitcoin miner onto gamers' PCs. Not only that, but the pirated copy of Watch Dogs is plagued with bugs, with it increasing CPU consumption by as much as 25% by running a process named "winlogin.exe" which shouldn't be confused with the legitimate "winlogon.exe".

We would suggest not downloading Watch Dogs illegally in the first place, grabbing it from the store or Steam, but if you have downloaded the torrent - the best and most thorough way of ridding your PC of the malware and Bitcoin miner associated would be to format your entire drive. Sure, you can run an anti-virus or anti-malware software, but a Bitcoin miner isn't a virus, so you might find yourself in a spot of trouble.

Computex kicks off for another year next week, but the teases are coming in thick and fast - this time, from ROCCAT. ROCCAT has a new website that is telling gamers to Own the Couch, teasing that it will announce something that is its "contribution to your living room experience" on June 10.

With a June 10 tease, ROCCAT is poised to show off or announce something big at E3 3014. ROCCAT's new website is its first step toward a game-changing product announcement on June 10, something we look forward to seeing. The video above is what you see on the Own the Couch website, so I'm going to take a guess that we're going to see some new gaming peripheral, but we could be surprised yet.

Star Citizen's crowdfunding has no signs of stopping, reaching a world-record crowdfunding total of $44 million. This surge in funding is most likely due to the upcoming dogfighting module which drops in a few days.

The last time we heard about Roberts Space Industries' space shooter was late last month, when Star Citizen reached $43 million in funding. There are more than 450,000 backers - myself included - and with the total of $44 million raised, $34 million of that has been raised since June last year.

The next stretch goal is at $46 million, which I'm sure will be hit before the end of next month, where backers will receive in-game "scanning software" which will allow them to find resources within the world of Star Citizen. The latest fundraising milestone has seem creator Chris Roberts release a piece of concept art for a "negotiation room" where players can make deals inside their ships.

NVIDIA's Tegra K1 is a serious chip, with 192 CUDA cores, NVIDIA's 4-Plus-1 quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor clocked at 2.3GHz, support for both DDR3L and LPDDR3 memory - up to 8GB of it actually, 4K output support, all on a 28nm process. This is something we spotted during our tour of the NVIDIA HQ in Santa Clara, California.

Well, this is now available as a Development Kit through NVIDIA's website for just $192. The Jetson TK1 development kit can be used to build devices and solutions for "computer vision, robotics, medicine, security, and automotive". For $192, you get the Jetson TK1 development board, AC adapter with power cord, USB Micro-B to USB A adapter, and a quick start guide.

It looks like Tyrese Gibson and Dr. Dre have smoked themselves into a corner with their bragging about Dr. Dre, Beats founder and hip-hop legend, where they said he would be "the first billionaire in hip-hop". Well, Apple wasn't happy with that, guys.

Gibson said in a video that Dre was "drunk off of Heinekens," something that was posted to Gibson's Facebook page minutes after Apple announced it was acquiring Beats for $3.2 billion. You can understand why Apple isn't happy with this, as it seems Beats apparently leaked the news of the $3.2 billion deal before it had a signature on the dotted line, according to Billboard.

Video game hardware purchases grew 47 percent, reaching $983 million during Q1 2014, according to The NPD Group research company. Both next-generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony, along with a resurgence in PC gaming, led to a great market for gamers wanting to purchase new hardware, software titles, and gaming accessories.

"For the first quarter of 2014, content spending increased for used games, digital full games, DLC, and mobile with a modest increase in subscription revenue," said Liam Callahan, NPD Industry Analyst, in a press release. "This is another example of the interplay of physical media as well as digital downloads as consumers transition further into this console generation."

The Sony PlayStation 4 game console outsold the Microsoft Xbox One for the fourth consecutive month in the United States - though both game consoles have doubled combined sales of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, respectively. It will be fun to see what both companies do in the next quarters, especially the 2014 holiday shopping season.

SSDs are already incredibly fast, pushing 500MB/sec in read/write speeds for around $200 - but how does a 300% speed increase sound to you? Yeah, I thought so. Well, a team from Japan's Chuo University have developed a new technology which solves some of the speed hurdles of SSDs associated with "garbage collection" on solid state drives.

The team has come up with an easy solution, which uses a "logical block address scrambler" which reduces the effects of the fragmentation, while at the same time reduces the amount of copies required during garbage collection. This new technology used on an SSD during their testing saw an increase in write speeds of a huge 300%, which also included a 60% reduction in power consumption, and a 55% decrease in write/erase cycles.

We don't know when, or even if this new technology will make it to SSDs in the near future - but if it does, it should see itself baked into SSDs over the next couple of years.

Sony is doing some good business with the PS4, but where's the next-gen Uncharted game everyone wants to see? Well, when Uncharted 4 finally arrives, the next adventure could be a little darker than the previous Uncharted games that have been released.

The news is coming from Tidux, an industry insider, who has tweeted that Uncharted 4 would be a "darker" entry in the franchise, with an even heavier focus on the story. Tidux tweeted "Uncharted 4 is a darker, story heavy game," with another tweet teasing "Blended with awesome epic moments," but if that wasn't enough, he adds "latest version of Uncharted 4 is bananas, simply bananas".

I'm looking forward to seeing what both Sony and Naughty Dog can do with the increased horsepower in the PS4 with a next-gen Uncharted game, but I'm hoping it's not too constrained if it's going to work on the slower, ageing PS3.