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Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Wearables are becoming more common, but smart clothing—arguably the most wearable wearables—remains somewhat obscure. Sensoria Fitness was one of the first companies on the smart clothing scene, and now it has a family of smart socks, shirts, and bras meant for those who are serious about fitness. The $199 smart socks have sensors embedded in them to collect running data, and the $139 smart bra has a built-in heart rate monitor ideal for heart rate zone training. While smart clothing may seem like a no-brainer for fitness buffs, execution is key: do these smart garments add enough value to training to be worth the price? And are they worth buying instead of other fitness trackers that collect the same stats?

Design: Comfortable, but a little embarrassing

Sensoria did its best to design its smart clothing as conventionally as possible. The socks look fairly simple at first glance, except for the thumb-sized strip attached near the top with the magnetic nodes that connect to the modules. This strip is made of a flexible, rubber-like material, and it's sewn into the fabric of the sock in order to move and bend along with the rest of the garment.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a ton of new deals to start 2016 off right! One of the highlights is a sale on Dell's newest UltraSharp monitors, but it won't last long. For one day only, you can get Dell's 32-inch 4K UltraSharp IPS monitor with 99.5 percent Adobe RGB coverage for just $1,349, down hundreds of dollars from its original price of $1,799. Dell also has price drops on other high-quality monitors. This sale ends tomorrow, so don't wait to snatch up the monitor that could carry you through the rest of the new year.

As usual, we have a number of laptop, desktop, smartphone, and accessories deals below.

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In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the absolute lowest strata of the community is occupied by cheaters. No matter the game, we all know the pain of going up against an obvious cheater: that person who makes the lives of other players a misery, and griefs them just for kicks. This isn't like being at the whim of some hacker who shows off by messing with the game—you're at the mercy of the weasels who bought or subscribed to their script to "win."

It is that shared hatred of cheaters that Valve taps into with Overwatch, its new crowdsourced anti-cheating tool. Overwatch, which lets experienced players like myself ban other players, works so well because we know what it's like to be on the receiving end of a wall-hacking charlatan. We know that a competitive match of CS:GO is on average a 45-minute commitment, and we know that abandoning it will result in punishment from teammates and game alike. We know that if we can keep CS:GO free of cheaters, the game—and the community—will be all the better for it.

The Overwatch

As the competitive first-person-shooter (it had over nine million unique players last month) CS:GO naturally attracts cheaters. Valve's solution is a simple one: let the players police themselves. The Overwatch gives "qualified" players—those that that have fulfilled certain criteria, such as a minimum rank and a minimum number of games—to take on the ultimate counter-terrorist role and strike the ban-hammer down on those that see through walls, or auto-aim their way to a string of unbelievable headshots. Putting the power to rid the game of cheaters in the hands of those who, by and large, are competitive-minded and thus inclined to hate those that break the rules, has proven to be a smart decision, even if it didn't always seem like it.

Brian Ratliff from Nuance gives us a demo of Dragon Drive, the voice activation system in the new BMW 7 Series. Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn (video link)

LAS VEGAS—Distracted driving is a real problem. Even though most of us intrinsically know that playing with our phones isn't compatible with piloting a vehicle surrounded by other vehicles and pedestrians, it's a common enough problem that more than a quarter of all crashes involve cell phone use. Not using a phone at all in the car is obviously the ideal solution, but like teenagers and sex, hoping for abstinence is a high-minded but ultimately ineffective approach. If people are going to text and drive—which they are—then systems that make that a safer activity are probably a good thing. At CES last week, Nuance (the company behind Dragon Dictation) gave us a demo of its solution to the problem.

(credit: Dan Klar)

The Supreme Court is setting aside a petition from the Electronic Privacy Information Center that demanded the Department of Homeland Security release the US government's secret plan to shutter mobile phone service during disasters.

The top court, without comment, refused Monday to review a federal appeals court's May ruling that the DHS did not have to divulge the full contents of Standard Operating Procedure 303. That court held that the government could withhold the plan's contents under the Freedom of Information Act if its disclosure would "endanger" public safety.

The privacy group had demanded the document in 2011 following the shuttering of cell service in the San Francisco Bay Area subway system to quell a protest. The DHS refused to divulge the SOP 303 documents, which the appeals court described as a "unified voluntary process for the orderly shut-down and restoration of wireless services during critical emergencies such as the threat of radio-activated improvised explosive devices." (Here is a copy of a heavily redacted version (PDF) of the protocol that EPIC's lawsuit produced.)