Steam's official forums are currently offline with a message reading "The Steam forums are temporarily offline for maintenance. Your patience is appreciated." Is maintenance the actual issue, though? It is believed that the site's vBulletin forum software may have been hacked, with Valve not yet to comment on the issue, with some gamers noticing a suspicious message on the forum last night that leads most to believe it was a security breach.

Eurogamer was contacted by a Steam user who said a group known as fkn0wned changed the text on the forum and spammed some user's e-mail addresses. Below is what was said:

Ever wanted to dominate the servers you play on with guaranteed results, but you were too afraid to cheat because of ban risks? Visit Fkn0wned.com. It's safe, secure and undetected. Along with hacks, we've also got some general discussion sections, hacking tutorials and tools, porn, free giveaways and much more. This site has been conditioned to meet all of your needs in terms of resources so be sure to take a look and tell us what you think. Thanks again, the fkn0wned team.

Ah, RumorTT time, and today we have some news of the next-generation [gaming] console from Microsoft. Why did I put [gaming] in and not the actual word? Well, it might not be a hardcore gaming console after all. The Xbox 720 as its most commonly referred to, is reportedly codenamed "Loop".

Loop is said to be much smaller than the Xbox 360, will reportedly cost less to produce in the hopes of achieving higher Kinect adoption according to Microsoft leak blogger MS Nerd. The next-generation Xbox is also said to be based on a modified version of the yet-to-be-announced Windows 9.

Yep! Windows 9! MS Nerd also said that:

Looking at picking up a new set of headphones over the xssy break? - You might be interested in one of six new pairs of headphones Sennheiser has just announced today. The new models in Sennheiser's line include the HD 219, HD 229, HD 239, HD 429, HD 439 and HD 449, all promising to deliver 'defined sound' in style.

The HD 219 will set you back only $59.95 and feature closed ear cups with a padded head band for excellent comfort. For an extra $20 you can shift up to the HD 229 which include the use of powerful neodymium magnets that promise precise stereo sound output.

Earlier today, MSI shot us an e-mail with some teaser shots of their various boards. Instead of an update to that post, this motherboard deserves its own spot on the news page just because it looks like a boss.

Enter, MSI's Big Bang XPower II, which features eight DIMMs, ten SATA ports (!), a slew of PCIe ports enough to plug in eleventy million cards, X-Fi MB2 on-board, and what stands out on its military black theme, is a row of 6 bullets that make up a magazine as a heatsink. We have never seen this before, except for oh wait, Gigabyte's G1 Sniper boards, but hey, two can play at this game, right?

The board itself is so big that MSI have had to change their underwear from ATX to XL-ATX to accomodate the extra girth.

The increasing global shortage on hard drives from the Thailand floods is causing PC vendors who are searching for HDDs to look into gray markets, which is in turn causing hikes in gray market prices from US$45 to over US$100 for a 500GB HDD and from US$35 to US$60-70 for a 320GB model, according to Taiwan-based PC supply chain makers.

Because the HDD industry's future is unknown, vendors are looking anywhere they can to source drives to fill their inventory. DigiTimes source claims that brand vendors are going into a "panic" to fill their HDD inventory. Most have reportedly placed orders to HDD makers with combined volume already double or triple their usual demand, but since HDD makers can only reply that they have no more inventory, or cannot provide supply status, it leaves vendors with one choice: the gray market.

Another issue is Japan-based HDD motor supplier Nidec has had close to 2,000 sets of equipment damaged by the floods which may take more than two years to fully recover. The same sources claim that Nidec are currently seeking equipment from related industry players, but the claims have not been confirmed by Nidec. Sources claim that once this machinery is submerged in water, the machines require a total replacement.

Microsoft don't do things small, and today was no exception. Customers can today experience new Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), with a selection of new, sleek and stylish smartphones from HTC and Samsung starting at just $49.99. The Samsung Focus S and Focus Flash are available today at AT&T and are the latest additions to the Windows Phone portfolio, joining the HTC Radar 4G available at T-Mobile USA Inc.

Microsoft designed Windows Phone around one simple concept: People belong at the center of the phone experience. This is where Microsoft go all-out and have put real people inside a gigantic six-story phone in NYC's Herald Square to bring to life the phone's key features and experiences. Included was a life-sized "Plants vs Zombies" battle highlighted the phones rich Xbox LIVE gaming experience.

The Music + Video Hub was bought to life by the Far East Movement performing a concert for hundreds of fans, and while "connecting people" was shown by a NY-based man proposing to his girlfriend from inside the Me Tile of the giant six-story phone.

Forget just wanting my two front teeth for Christmas, this puppy has just gone straight to the top. All I want for Christmas is OCZ's newly announced RevoDrive 3 Max IOPS solid state drive. This devil combines a proven cutting-edge PCI Express-based architecture and OCZ proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0 flash virtualization layer with premium NAND flash components that deliver exceptional 4KB random write performance of up to 245,000 IOPS, as well as increased transfer rates of 1900MB/sec reads and 1725MB/sec writes.

Daryl Lang, VP of Product Management for OCZ Technology Group says:

The new RevoDrive 3 Max IOPS solid state drives further expand on our original PCIe series, and are designed to deliver even more bandwidth for the most demanding applications. Engineered to leverage the benefits of multi-threaded processors and applications, the Max IOPS provides both the performance and features required by clients to address the most intensive workloads common in high performance computing and workstation environments.

My inbox this morning had some glorious news, a tease of the upcoming Sandy Bridge-E boards from MSI. Included, was the super high-end Big Bang XPower II board, all the way down to the smaller micro-ATX X79MA-GD45. If you like pics, there's a bunch below:

First up is the X79A-GD65 8D, which does look quite pretty. It sports various features such as the usual quad-channel DDR3, but includes THX TruStudio PRO sound, CrossFire X and SLI support. It also includes eight SATA ports and eight DIMMs if you're RAM and Storage crazy like most of us.

Next up is the X79A-GD65, only featuring four DIMMs and six SATA ports. This is obviously just a step down from its stronger, bigger brother.

Buffalo is now preparing shipments of its BDXL-format supporting "BRXL-PCW6U2-BK" external/portable Blu-ray writer.

The unit connects via USB 2.0 and includes support for both 3-layer (100GB) and 4-layer (128GB) BDXL discs. The drive runs measurements of 145 x 19 x 153 mm with a weight of 340 grams. It will ship with a couple built-in USB cables whereby one acts as the data path and the other for power.

As for write speeds, the drive can do up to 4x for BDXL media, 6x for BD-R (single- and dual-layer), 2x for BD-RE, 8x for DVD-R/+R/+RW, 6x for DVD-R DL/+R DL/-RW, 5x for DVD-RAM, 24x for CD-R and 16x for CD-RW.

Panasonic has made a couple announcements today with two new Lumix series cameras - the DMC-GX1 Micro Four Thirds and DMC-3D1.

Beginning with the former, the GX1 sports a Venus Engine image processor with a 16.01MP Live MOS sensor and a sensitivity of up to ISO 12800. It includes a Contrast AF focus system with 0.09 second (Light Speed AF) autofocus and the use of a dust reduction system, as well as One Push AE and the iA and iA Plus modes for automatic shots.

The LCD on the new GX1 is touch-enabled, being 3-inch (460,000-dot) in size. The camera is capable of recording video at up to 1080/60i and will come in two colour options - black and silver. There will also be two differing kits on offer from Panasonic for this model, the DMC-GX1-K which comes with the 14-42 standard zoom (priced at $800) and the DMC-GX1-X which has the Lumix G X Vario PZ 14-42mm / F3.5-5.6 ASPH. / POWER O.I.S (H-PS14042) lens (at $950).