Valve recently unveiled its grand plan for the long anticipated Steam Boxes. Now being called Steam Machines, Valve said that the new gaming consoles will be developed and sold by partners, but the company did mention that it would be making a Steam Box of its own, and 300 lucky Steam users would be getting one to beta test.

No other mention was made about the hardware that we might see packed inside Valve's Steam Box at the time of the initial release, but today we have found out what those beta boxes will contain. Valve says that the first Steam Machine will be a high-end device that features off-the-shelf PC hardware, and will be fully upgradeable like a normal gaming PC.

Valve's Steam Machine will be served up with several hardware configurations with GPUs spanning from NVIDIA's GTX Titan, GTX780, GTX760 and GTX660. CPUs will conside of Intel i7-4770, i5-4570, and some i3 processors. RAM allocation will be 16GB of unknown origin and storage will consist of a 1TB/8GB hybrid SSHD. A 450W 80Plus PSU will handle power delivery, and the entire thing will fit in a case just over 12-inches by 12-inches by 3 inches. No image was issued with the hardware details.

We are finally seeing PC games move into the 64-bit world after what has felt like forever, with Ubisoft's Watch Dogs requiring a 64-bit OS to function. The news comes from the studio unveiling the requirements of its upcoming super open-world game.

Watch Dogs will require a 64-bit OS, a DirectX 9.0c-capable GPU, and 20GB of spare HDD space. Recommended hardware includes a DX11-capable GPU with at least 1GB of VRAM, 4GB of system RAM, and a quad-core CPU. As for GPUs, it's suggested that you use an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 or AMD Radeon HD 5770. If you want to run the 'recommended' level, you're going to require much more power.

Ubisoft recommends 2GB of VRAM, an 8-core processor and at least 8GB of system RAM. Watch Dogs is said to scale very well on multi-core processors, so if you're in the market for a new CPU, you might want to grab that 6- or 8-core processor. With the recommended level, the GPU requirements go up, but not too bad, up to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti or AMD Radeon HD 7850.

Some of our readers may be shocked to hear that the car they drove to work this morning may have a hard drive under the dash. With today's vehicles featuring more and more technology, we have to have somewhere to store all that data, and HGST has been leading the way for years now.

Earlier this week, HGST announced that it has began shipping the sixth generation of its automotive friendly HDDs. The new Endurastar J4K320 line of hard drives feature a single platter design that has been refined for the automotive infotainment and telematics market. With capacities up to 320GB, the new Endurastar drives are built to survive the rugged environment that automobiles not only reside in, but also create.

The hard drives have to be able to withstand extreme temperatures with very fast fluctuations between hot and cold, while at the same time retaining enough rigidity to handle the stray pothole or speed bump the vehicle may encounter. The Endurastar hard drives can handle altitudes up to 18,000 feet, and can operate in temperatures from -22F all the way up to 185F. Shock loads up to 300Gs will not phase the drive either.

Western Digital owned Virident Systems, has announced that it has pushed the capacity boundaries past their limits, and developed a new low-profile PCIe-based SSD that features 4.8TB of storage space. The new 4.8TB FlashMax Capacity card more than doubles the capacity of the current FlashMax II while still retaining all of the features that made the previous model such a success.

"Flash has firmly entrenched itself as the storage of choice for the increasingly demanding workloads being seen in the enterprise," said Jason Walker, senior network architect, IPFS Corporation. "However, until now the relatively limited capacity of PCIe flash cards has made it less efficient for capacity storage FlashMAX Capacity's 4.8TB of flash storage matches the capacity of a traditional HDD drive and doesn't require managing and integrating multiple tiers of storage. The combined capacity and performance Virident will provide is a big step forward for the storage industry, supporting the acceptance of, and move to, an all-silicon data center."

The 4.8TB FlasMAX Capacity model boast the same features as the FlashMAX II, and includes the same sustainable and predictable performance of its predecessor. Virident says the drive is compatible with the FlashMAX Connect Suite that allows users to extend the FlashMAX family of products with features such as Shared Storage Management and Data Management.The FlashMAX Capacity will arrive in the latter half of Q4 2013.

This morning the Arduino team announced the unveiling of two new development boards that have been designed and built in conjunction with Intel and Texas Instruments, two of the largest chip manufacturers in the world. Each board brings forth a completely new set of hardware and features, while still retaining the popular Arduino header pin form factor.

Up first is the new Intel Galileo, an Arduino compatible embedded development board that features Intel's new Quark X1000 SoC. This new chip from Intel is a very low-power slice of silicon that features an X86 based, single-threaded, Pentium-based processor that is clocked in at 400MHz. To help seed the market, Intel and Arduino will be handing out 50,000 of these new boards to 1000 universities around the world.

Up next is a very interesting board from Texas Instruments. The Arduino TRE is the first Arduino board to be manufactured in the USA and features a 1GHz Sitara AM335x processor. Texas Instruments says that the Sitara processor gives the Arduino 100 times the processing power of the Arduino Uno or Leonardo and will open up the Arduino world to new and exciting projects. The Arduino TRE features the familiar Arduino compatible header layout for shield compatibility, as well as host of new I/O headers along the side of the board.

I was a massive fan of the original Deus Ex, and I did enjoy Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and now I'm excited for the news of Deus Ex: Universe. It feels like it has come out of nowhere, really.

Edios Montreal's boss, David Anfossi, explains how the Deus Ex universe (heh) is going forward: "The concept behind Deus Ex: Universe is to create an ongoing, expanding and connected game world built across a generation of core games. It's a commitment on our part to deliver meaningful content that expands the franchise on a regular basis and to deliver a deep conspiracy that will span several connected Deus Ex games, creating a more immersive and richer experience than ever before. Deus Ex: Universe will include PC and console games, but also additional Deus Ex games and experiences available in other media such as tablets, smartphones, books, graphic novels, etc. I'm pleased to confirm that we are already into production of the starting point for Deus Ex: Universe with a new game for PC and next-generation consoles."

The image you see above is actually a piece of art from Universe, which depicts the results of "trans-humanism segregation" which will be a very big part of the game.

Most are impressed with the NSA's Apple's TouchID fingerprint scanner, being the only real change on the iPhone 5S, but hacking collective Anonymous has come out with quite the claim: the US government is using the TouchID database to collect citizens' fingerprints.

Anonymous has released a video, above, with several documents supporting its claim. Anonymous claims to have uncovered evidence of a "corrupt alliance" between the US government and a bunch of its contractors. AuthenTec, the company who made Apple's TouchID technology, reportedly has strong ties to "the most powerful and corrupt Defense Department and Intelligence Community contractors and figures." This is an interesting quote from the piece:

In brief, the claims the group make concerning Touch ID seem to focus on Authentec director, Robert E Grady, who appears to have been a prominent figure within the George Bush administration and (Anonymous claim) was connected with The Carlyle Group, which Anonymous also claim is a majority shareholder in Booz Allen Hamilton, the NSA contractor with which whistleblower Edward Snowden worked.

Thanks to Walt Disney Pictures Australia, we have been granted two copies of this week's release of The Jungle Book on Blu-ray to give away to two lucky readers.

The timeless Disney classic has been temporarily released from the Disney vault ready to enchant a new generation of families with a state of the art video restoration, 7.1 DTS-HD audio and a suite of extra features.

To go into the running, correctly answer the following question:

Anyone who has been following the Bitcoin saga, will likely have ran across reports that the virtual currency is fueling the online drug trade. For anyone who doubted this, today's seizure of Silk Road proves just how closely connected the two really were. Reports suggest as much as $1 billion of Bitcoin transactions occurred as a direct result of Silk Road.

Today as news began to spread about Silk Road being shut down by the FBI, the price of Bitcoins dropped from $130 down to just over $85. Analyst are speculating that the selloff was the direct result of Silk Roads seizure, and indicated that many users felt uncertain about the future of the virtual currency. There could potentially be millions of Bitcoins that are frozen in limbo as a result of the seizure, and they will most likely never be claimed by their owners. At the time of this writing, the Bitcoin price had rebounded to about $120.

Earlier today, the FBI announced that it had seized Silk Road, an underground drug marketplace located on the darkweb. Along with the seizure came the arrest of the website's founder, Ross Ulbricht. Silk Road was only accessible through the TOR network, and was responsible for the sale of billions of dollars of drugs.

Anyone could logon, and purchase a bag of weed, a few ecstasy pills, or even much harder drugs like heroin and crystal meth. Ulbricht is being charged with narcotics trafficking, computer hacking, and money laundering, and could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted. The bust came after FBI agents and law enforcement officers made more than 100 purchases through the "hidden" site, many of which were said to contain very high purity drugs.

The FBI report says that Silk Road did more than $1.2 billion in illegal drug transactions since 2011 which netted Ulbricht about $80 million in commissions from the sale. The website had more than 957,079 registered users and conducted more than 1.2 million transactions. Between 2011 and 2013.