Month: December 2015

(credit: Zach Copley)

On Thursday, Thai authorities told reporters that they plan on extraditing Roger Thomas Clark, the Canadian man accused of being a top adviser to Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht.

"We caught and detained him and he is being held by immigration police in Bangkok," said Songpol Wattanachai, a deputy spokesman for national police, according to Reuters. "We are in the process of sending him back to the United States as America asked for him. We can send him back in about a month."

Clark, who was arrested last week in Thailand, has been criminally charged in the United States with one count of narcotics conspiracy and one count of money laundering conspiracy.

Hello Arsians! Thanks to our partners at TechBargains, we have another great gaming deal for you today. You can save $50 on an Xbox One Elite console, complete with a 1TB SSD and a wireless controller, and the deal includes a $100 Dell gift card as well. All of that is just $449, which is a steal considering the Elite controllers are sold out everywhere and regularly cost $150 each. Get this deal now for yourself or for someone on your holiday shopping list before it's gone!

We also have a number of laptop, tablet, TV, and gaming deals listed below.

Featured deals

For a game that's been in development for nearly three years, that Eve: Valkyrie's public appearances have been limited to little more than elaborate tech demos is a worry. Sure, they've been smooth and very pretty tech demos—and some of the best demonstrations of the nascent virtual reality platforms—but they've all been devoid of any sense of how the game might actually function as a game, let alone did they provide a convincing reason for fans to strap an expensive brick of plastic to their faces for an hour or two.

But, with the likes of the Oculus Rift—where Eve: Valkyrie will be bundled with pre-orders—HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR all due for release in the first half of 2016, Valkyrie has finally had a more complete outing. Officially, the game's in "pre-alpha," but it is largely feature complete.

There's been a lot of confusion and mixed messages regarding what's actually in Eve: Valkyrie, so here are the facts: Valkyrie is primarily a competitive, team-based multiplayer game, but PvE content is going to be available from the outset. That PvE content does not include any kind of campaign mode, although some light storytelling does exist.

Earlier today, Volkswagen held a press conference at its headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, to update the world about the automaker's ongoing emissions scandal. VW CEO Matthias Müller and chairman Hans Dieter Pötsch discussed the roots of the problem, VW's proposed fixes for some of the affected cars, and the company's reorganization plans.

In fact, VW has two separate emissions problems. The first came to light in September, when the US Environmental Protection Agency sent a notice of violation to VW informing the car maker that 500,000 diesel-engined cars would have to be recalled over "defeat device software" embedded in their engine control units. VW's four-cylinder EA 198 diesel engine contains code that detects when a car undergoes an emissions test and adjusts the engine tuning. This decreases the amount of NOx compounds produced in the exhaust to legal limits, allowing the vehicle to pass the test at the cost of reduced power (and therefore efficiency).

Before long, the scandal had grown beyond the 500,000 cars sold in the US to include up to 11 million vehicles worldwide. More recently, the EPA notified VW group that the 3L V6 diesel used by VW, Audi, and Porsche also has an illegal auxiliary emissions control device.

(credit: Washington State Department of Transportation)

Verizon is reportedly set to begin testing a sponsored data program that would let companies pay Verizon to deliver online services without using up customers' data plans. The news comes from a Re/code interview with Verizon Executive VP Marni Walden. “The capabilities we’ve built allow us to break down any byte that is carried across our network and have all or a portion of that sponsored,” Walden told Re/code.

Verizon will start testing sponsored data "in the next few days" with a few partners and will make it widely available early next year, Re/code reported. “We’ll be out in a larger commercial way in the first quarter of 2016,” Walden said.

The sponsored data program would presumably target just the Verizon Wireless portion of the company's business. Verizon home Internet service has no strict data cap.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Account theft is a common and longstanding problem for all kinds of online gaming services, as I can personally attest after losing all of my Diablo III loot to a hacker a few years ago. But Valve says the problem is reaching epidemic proportions on Steam, with "around 77,000 accounts hijacked and pillaged each month." Since the service launched item-trading features back in 2011, Valve says the problem of account theft "has increased twenty-fold as the number one complaint from our users... What used to be a handful of hackers is now a highly effective, organized network, in the business of stealing and selling items."

It's not hard to see why the problem is increasing. Items in games like Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: GO can be worth a lot of real money on the secondary market, not to mention the inexplicably popular virtual trading cards floating around the Steam social network. As Valve puts it "practically every active Steam account is now involved in the economy, via items or trading cards, with enough value to be worth a hacker's time. Essentially all Steam accounts are now targets." Goods transferred from stolen accounts can be relatively easy to unload on unsuspecting legitimate customers, too, making it hard to unwind the theft once it's detected.

Now, Valve is taking additional steps to decrease the value of these hacks when they happen. By default, traded items will now be "held" by Valve for "up to three days"—hopefully enough time to give users a chance to discover their account has been compromised (and to prevent quick item transfer/liquidation by the hackers). Users that have two-factor authentication enabled will be exempt from this restriction, since their accounts are theoretically safe from most hacking attempts. Trades between users that have been friends for a year or more will only be held for "up to one day" even without two-factor, since that implies a real relationship between the traders.