F5 Live: Refreshing Technology (Video)

This week, Japan, Europe and Barcelona!

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

With over ten years of audio engineering experience, Nick's addition to PLuGHiTz Corporation is best served when he is behind the mixing board every Sunday night to produce the audio side of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Piltch Point and PLuGHiTz Live Night Cap. While mixing live every week, his previous radio show hosting experience gives him the ability to co-host as well, giving each show a unique flare with his slightly off-center, yet still realistic take on all things tech. An integral part of the show, you can find Nick always enveloped in coming up with new (and sometimes crazy) ideas and content for the show and you can always expect the most direct opinion on the stories that he feels need to be shared with the world. During the few hours where Nick isn't sleeping or working on ways to improve the company, he spends his free time going to hockey and football games and playing the latest titles on Xbox 360. Email him for his gamertag and add him today for a fun escape from the normal monotony and annoyance that the Xbox LIVE gaming community can sometimes be!

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

Game developers and app creators could be facing some stricter requirements from the European Union when it comes to their free-to-play games. Google and Apple are both set to meet with the European Commission to discuss free-to-play games and how the consumer uses these games. Specifically, the EU wants to ensure customers are not being deceived by free-to-play titles that are solely more of the "pay-to-win" type.

It has been a weird year for Bitcoin, the crypto currency that seems to have everyone a little confused. First, several new online retailers started accepting Bitcoin as an official payment type. Then, the first Bitcoin ATMs were installed and began operation. On the other hand, there have been several bank heists, accounting for hundeds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin thefts.

Reporting on Hulu's moves is like watching a tennis match: if you look away for even a moment you don't know where the ball is. In a blog post this week, Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins announced that the company had sold its Japanese brand to broadcaster Nippon Television Network. The details of the sale have not been disclosed.

This week, Netflix tries to fix its lag, Facebook overpays to stay competitive and game devs place bounties on hackers.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

With over ten years of audio engineering experience, Nick's addition to PLuGHiTz Corporation is best served when he is behind the mixing board every Sunday night to produce the audio side of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Piltch Point and PLuGHiTz Live Night Cap. While mixing live every week, his previous radio show hosting experience gives him the ability to co-host as well, giving each show a unique flare with his slightly off-center, yet still realistic take on all things tech. An integral part of the show, you can find Nick always enveloped in coming up with new (and sometimes crazy) ideas and content for the show and you can always expect the most direct opinion on the stories that he feels need to be shared with the world. During the few hours where Nick isn't sleeping or working on ways to improve the company, he spends his free time going to hockey and football games and playing the latest titles on Xbox 360. Email him for his gamertag and add him today for a fun escape from the normal monotony and annoyance that the Xbox LIVE gaming community can sometimes be!

After being in a partnership for years, Verizon and Vodafone Group finally parted ways on their collaboration, Verizon Wireless. Vodafone, who owned 45 percent of the joint venture, sold it to Verizon proper for $130 billion in cash and stock. This leaves Verizon as the sole owner of Verizon Wireless: a goal they have had for a few years now with no help from Vodafone.

On Tuesday, MMORPG Wurm Online suffered an attack, causing their servers to fail completely. The attack, a distributed denial-of-service attack, kept the service offline through Wednesday as the company moved their servers to a new host. The move was planned, but the timeline was changed in light of the attack and their previous host ending their relationship. A representative posted,

A week after Rakuten purchased Viber, Facebook, not to be outdone in the expanding messaging market, has agreed to purchase WhatsApp. For those who might not know what WhatsApp is, the simple answer is a mobile app that allows people to send unlimited international text messages for $1 per year.

If you've been having problems streaming Netflix lately, you're not the only one. As we've covered in the past, ISPs are to be blamed for the slow speeds. So even if you want to watch House of Cards in Super HD on your ridiculously fast connection, it still might not be possible because of Internet providers throttling bandwidth and slowing speeds to Netflix. However, Comcast users can now rejoice as a deal has been struck to eliminate that nagging problem.

This week, Microsoft's valentine might not be the PC, the wireless kill switch could be engaged by Congress and Comcast could become the king of all video things.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

With over ten years of audio engineering experience, Nick's addition to PLuGHiTz Corporation is best served when he is behind the mixing board every Sunday night to produce the audio side of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Piltch Point and PLuGHiTz Live Night Cap. While mixing live every week, his previous radio show hosting experience gives him the ability to co-host as well, giving each show a unique flare with his slightly off-center, yet still realistic take on all things tech. An integral part of the show, you can find Nick always enveloped in coming up with new (and sometimes crazy) ideas and content for the show and you can always expect the most direct opinion on the stories that he feels need to be shared with the world. During the few hours where Nick isn't sleeping or working on ways to improve the company, he spends his free time going to hockey and football games and playing the latest titles on Xbox 360. Email him for his gamertag and add him today for a fun escape from the normal monotony and annoyance that the Xbox LIVE gaming community can sometimes be!

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

Last week, a bill creating a state-wide wireless kill switch was proposed in California. The pitched reasoning for the capability is to terminate a phone that has been reported as lost or stolen. The state believes that, if a stolen phone can be made useless, many or all mobile thefts would be eliminated.

There was a lot of question about Microsoft's commitment to PC gaming 6 months ago when they shuttered their Games for Windows Live brand. Some feared that the full shutdown of the brand meant the end of PC gaming from Microsoft, though Microsoft urged gamers that their commitment had shifted to the Xbox brand on Windows 8.

It is always interesting to watch an industry who has been stable with the same players for years get shaken up when a collection of new players decide to enter. The market that currently everyone seems to be jumping into is messaging. Now, the messaging industry has been fairly consistent with Skype, AIM and Yahoo! Messenger being the big players for ages. Near the end of their run, Myspace tried to enter the market unsuccessfully, and Facebook has certainly made a name for themselves in the market, but in the last couple of years, we have seen a plethora of new names.

This week, rising media company Comcast announced a $45 billion merger with slumping media company Time Warner Cable. The agreement, which has been approved by both Board of Directors, would be entirely in stock where Comcast will trade 2.875 shares of Comcast for each of the 284.9 million Time Warner Cable shares. When the deal is complete, TWC shareholders will own about 23 percent of Comcast's common stock.

This week, Amazon is seeing double with gaming, Twitter sees red but pretends it's gold and Scott sees that the dark side isn't so great after all.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

With over ten years of audio engineering experience, Nick's addition to PLuGHiTz Corporation is best served when he is behind the mixing board every Sunday night to produce the audio side of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Piltch Point and PLuGHiTz Live Night Cap. While mixing live every week, his previous radio show hosting experience gives him the ability to co-host as well, giving each show a unique flare with his slightly off-center, yet still realistic take on all things tech. An integral part of the show, you can find Nick always enveloped in coming up with new (and sometimes crazy) ideas and content for the show and you can always expect the most direct opinion on the stories that he feels need to be shared with the world. During the few hours where Nick isn't sleeping or working on ways to improve the company, he spends his free time going to hockey and football games and playing the latest titles on Xbox 360. Email him for his gamertag and add him today for a fun escape from the normal monotony and annoyance that the Xbox LIVE gaming community can sometimes be!

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

In a deal that has been leaving many scratching their heads, Google, after two of owning the brand, has decided to sell off Motorola to Lenovo. The agreement will give Lenovo a bigger position into the North and Latin American markets and will set them up for presence in Western Europe.

Amazon, in an attempt to enter each and every media space known to man, announced this week that it was buying video game studio Double Helix Games, whose best known for the Xbox One version of Killer Instinct. If this isn't proof that Amazon is looking to go head-on with its own gaming console against the competition, I don't know what is.

As popular as Twitter may be, if it doesn't make money, it's not going to be here forever. This week Twitter had to finally post its earnings, after going public last quarter amidst filing deceptions and SEC investigations. So how much money did Twitter make? It should be no surprise here that the company lost money in its first quarter. And a lot of it.

This week, King rules over candy, Gmail has a secret, empty love for Hotmail and Verizon makes FiOS pretty with videos.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

With over ten years of audio engineering experience, Nick's addition to PLuGHiTz Corporation is best served when he is behind the mixing board every Sunday night to produce the audio side of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Piltch Point and PLuGHiTz Live Night Cap. While mixing live every week, his previous radio show hosting experience gives him the ability to co-host as well, giving each show a unique flare with his slightly off-center, yet still realistic take on all things tech. An integral part of the show, you can find Nick always enveloped in coming up with new (and sometimes crazy) ideas and content for the show and you can always expect the most direct opinion on the stories that he feels need to be shared with the world. During the few hours where Nick isn't sleeping or working on ways to improve the company, he spends his free time going to hockey and football games and playing the latest titles on Xbox 360. Email him for his gamertag and add him today for a fun escape from the normal monotony and annoyance that the Xbox LIVE gaming community can sometimes be!

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

It wasn't long ago that King.com (hereafter referred to as just King, as this is not 1997) began to rule the casual game universe, having dethroned Zynga as top dog. Apparently their quick rise in popularity has given the company an Electronic Arts-style ego. Let's take a look at what they have done just this week, shall we?

Apparently, because of a glitch in some Google code somewhere that appeared only after the Gmail outage this week, a simple search for Gmail on Google will give you the unfortunate ability to email David S. Peck of Fresno, California. Who is Peck, you might ask? Some guy who happens to have a Hotmail account that is, for whatever reason, pre-populated into a compose window on the search results page.

The rumor from back in October of Verizon picking up Intel's OnCue, a web-TV service, has actually come to fruition this week. Verizon officially announced that it will be purchasing Intel Media, Intel's media assets, in its entirety.

This week, hackers scratch up your Chrome, gaming has officially gone digital and... the movie industry has, too.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

With over ten years of audio engineering experience, Nick's addition to PLuGHiTz Corporation is best served when he is behind the mixing board every Sunday night to produce the audio side of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Piltch Point and PLuGHiTz Live Night Cap. While mixing live every week, his previous radio show hosting experience gives him the ability to co-host as well, giving each show a unique flare with his slightly off-center, yet still realistic take on all things tech. An integral part of the show, you can find Nick always enveloped in coming up with new (and sometimes crazy) ideas and content for the show and you can always expect the most direct opinion on the stories that he feels need to be shared with the world. During the few hours where Nick isn't sleeping or working on ways to improve the company, he spends his free time going to hockey and football games and playing the latest titles on Xbox 360. Email him for his gamertag and add him today for a fun escape from the normal monotony and annoyance that the Xbox LIVE gaming community can sometimes be!

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

While FreedomPop may be offering extremely attractive deals to get customers to sign up to its service, there's other competition in the freemium mobile hotspot space, and one of the other sheriffs in town is NetZero. The company announced this week that it has deployed an even bigger broadband service that will cover over 276 million people, using Sprint's 3G network, and 4G rollout is expected very soon.

Last month, I promised that after I reported Black Friday sales numbers for both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, that I would bring you the full holiday numbers once they became available. This week, I have December numbers and financials for the entire year for the gaming industry, so I guess those will have to do. All of these numbers are for the US.

Self-updating apps have become quite popular, with most major web browsers (except Apple's Safari) updating themselves and even Windows 8.1 introduced self-updating applications from the store, meaning you never have to deal with actively maintaining your computer - a task best left to the computer itself. That is, until those updates introduce new, undesired features into your overall computing experience.

We knew that Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues was going to be funny, but I don't think anyone expected it to be historic. Paramount Pictures has decided to make it just that, however, announcing that the film will be the last one the studio distributes on film. Starting now, if a movie theatre would like to show a Paramount movie, it will have to be done in a digital theater.

This week, the team's heading back home as we recap the 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

With over ten years of audio engineering experience, Nick's addition to PLuGHiTz Corporation is best served when he is behind the mixing board every Sunday night to produce the audio side of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Piltch Point and PLuGHiTz Live Night Cap. While mixing live every week, his previous radio show hosting experience gives him the ability to co-host as well, giving each show a unique flare with his slightly off-center, yet still realistic take on all things tech. An integral part of the show, you can find Nick always enveloped in coming up with new (and sometimes crazy) ideas and content for the show and you can always expect the most direct opinion on the stories that he feels need to be shared with the world. During the few hours where Nick isn't sleeping or working on ways to improve the company, he spends his free time going to hockey and football games and playing the latest titles on Xbox 360. Email him for his gamertag and add him today for a fun escape from the normal monotony and annoyance that the Xbox LIVE gaming community can sometimes be!

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

This week, it's the International Consumer Electronics Show 2014! Is there anything else to say?

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

With over ten years of audio engineering experience, Nick's addition to PLuGHiTz Corporation is best served when he is behind the mixing board every Sunday night to produce the audio side of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Piltch Point and PLuGHiTz Live Night Cap. While mixing live every week, his previous radio show hosting experience gives him the ability to co-host as well, giving each show a unique flare with his slightly off-center, yet still realistic take on all things tech. An integral part of the show, you can find Nick always enveloped in coming up with new (and sometimes crazy) ideas and content for the show and you can always expect the most direct opinion on the stories that he feels need to be shared with the world. During the few hours where Nick isn't sleeping or working on ways to improve the company, he spends his free time going to hockey and football games and playing the latest titles on Xbox 360. Email him for his gamertag and add him today for a fun escape from the normal monotony and annoyance that the Xbox LIVE gaming community can sometimes be!

This week, LG attempts to resurrect webOS once again, BitTorrent attempts to hide your conversations from the world and Aereo attempts to end their battle once and for all.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

I can't quite believe I am writing this article again, but here it is. After last year's rumors of an LG webOS Smart TV at CES 2013 didn't pan out exactly as expected, LG decided to one-up the rumors. Rather than licensing webOS for their Smart TV line, they decided to buy the former mobile operating system outright.

Another game release, another lawsuit. This really should just be EA's tagline at this point. From problems with the NCAA (and canceling the game) to suing Zynga for being a look-a-like, the company is always involved in some sort of legal matter. Now, a class-action lawsuit has been filed, with EA coming under fire for both the still-broken state of Battlefield 4, as well as alluding to false success of the game, with EA employees then selling off stock to the tune of over $12 million.

Since Snowden originally revealed that, through PRISM and other programs, the US government has been spying on, well, everything that everyone does, security has become a hot topic. From encrypted email services to on-site cloud platforms, the fear of government snooping on the Internet has never been higher, and never before have so many people been trying to solve said problem.

Court cases seem to be the popular way to keep Aereo in the news as of late. Whether or not the next round, a push from the broadcasters to bring Aereo to the Supreme Court, will bode successful or not doesn't really matter right now. This is because legal issues also take up Aereo's time and prevent the company from expanding, which is what the networks want to happen anyway. This week, CEO and founder Chet Kanojia explained why some of the 24 markets promised still haven't seen Aereo appear. I'm sure you can guess why.

This week, Microsoft brings original content to Xbox, Apple tries to track you with real nanobots and YouTube erroneously brings down videos.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

With over ten years of audio engineering experience, Nick's addition to PLuGHiTz Corporation is best served when he is behind the mixing board every Sunday night to produce the audio side of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Piltch Point and PLuGHiTz Live Night Cap. While mixing live every week, his previous radio show hosting experience gives him the ability to co-host as well, giving each show a unique flare with his slightly off-center, yet still realistic take on all things tech. An integral part of the show, you can find Nick always enveloped in coming up with new (and sometimes crazy) ideas and content for the show and you can always expect the most direct opinion on the stories that he feels need to be shared with the world. During the few hours where Nick isn't sleeping or working on ways to improve the company, he spends his free time going to hockey and football games and playing the latest titles on Xbox 360. Email him for his gamertag and add him today for a fun escape from the normal monotony and annoyance that the Xbox LIVE gaming community can sometimes be!

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

One of the stranger hurdles in the Nokia transition to Microsoft has been a handset factory in India. The factory in question was seized by the Indian government because of owed taxes from Nokia regarding software licenses. The seizure meant that Nokia did not technically own the facility, which was scheduled to change hands to Microsoft.

Anyone who produces regular content for YouTube has had a video flagged before. It can be for music, video, imagery and, sometimes, it can be for something outside of your control. For example, music playing very quietly in the background of a live event where you are conducting an interview.

It has been two years since we discussed Foot Path's customer tracking service and the inevitable consumer fallout that occurred as a result. In those two years more smartphones have been sold and consumers have become even more weary of being tracked, both online and in reality. The move away from cookies on the Internet has been the biggest recent indicator.

If you want more proof that Microsoft's Xbox One is truly meant for all walks of life, we have it this week. Microsoft announced that the company will be launching its first batch of original programming on the Xbox One and also the Xbox 360 sometime in early 2014. This would put the next-gen console in direct competition with Amazon Instant Video, Hulu and Netflix, which all currently offer original content on their services. The difference here is that both the Xbox 360 and Xbox One will have content on a platform that Microsoft has complete control over.