Sketches of a supposed "Kinect Glasses" system from a 2012 Microsoft document leak, which remain unrealized despite the "2013" planning date in the corner.

Sony officially announced its Project Morpheus virtual reality headset last night, and plenty of other companies have been following Oculus' lead into the VR and/or augmented reality spaces at GDC. In that light, many observers are now eagerly watching for any hints of similar plans from Microsoft beyond the already rumored head-mounted display. The company doesn't seem too worried about falling behind by the new VR gold rush, though, with Xbox Group Program Manager David Dennis telling Ars that "we'll see how the VR space evolves."

When asked about Sony's recent Morpheus announcement, Dennis said he "love[s] seeing innovation in the category, [and] it will be great to see how consumers and developers respond and what they're able to build for it." But when asked if Microsoft was missing its opportunity to catch that wave of innovation, Dennis' response indicated that he thinks it's still a bit early to assume that VR will be any bigger than the 3D TV "revolution" was a few years ago.

"At this point, everything you're seeing out there is just prototypes and development stuff," Dennis noted regarding projects like Rift and Morpheus. "I think for us, it will be interesting to see how consumers respond and what experiences developers are able to deliver."

Between releasing a Steam Machine prototype complete with a Steam Controller and releasing SteamOS beta into the wild, Valve had a busy 2013. What's in store for the gaming company in the new year? Gaming Editor Kyle Orland will be on hand at CES to find out.

Valve's Las Vegas press conference will be held at 5pm PT on Monday, January 6, and you can get all the information first-hand through our liveblog (find the time of the event in your timezone here). Ars has already taken a rather extensive look at Valve's latest endeavor, SteamOS, reviewing the software on a rig we built ourselves. But in the coming year, Valve will push its own hardware as well as this software, and according to an interview CEO Gabe Newell gave to the Washington Post on Friday, Valve will take its moment in the spotlight at CES to announce the hardware partners for the Steam Machine. (The prototype released in December contained standard, off-the-shelf PC parts, and Valve said they were subject to change.)

Certainly, with the recent releases of the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, enthusiasts will be watching Valve carefully to see if its console can be competitive against these two giants and third-party Steam Machine builders. As for PC devotees, it will be interesting to see if Steam's hardware can lure these gamers from their desktops to Valve's new box. Plenty of questions remain, and tomorrow should be the start of some answers—stay tuned. View Liveblog

Officials from RSA Security are advising customers of the company's BSAFE toolkit and Data Protection Manager to stop using a crucial cryptography component in the products that was recently revealed to contain a backdoor engineered by the National Security Agency.

An advisory sent to select RSA customers on Thursday confirms that both products by default use something known as Dual EC_DRBG when creating cryptographic keys. The specification, which was approved in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and later by the International Organization for Standardization, contains a backdoor that was inserted by the NSA, the New York Times reported last week. RSA's advisory came 24 hours after Ars asked the company if it intended to warn BSAFE customers about the deliberately crippled pseudo random number generator (PRNG), which is so weak that it undermines the security of most or all cryptography systems that use it.

"To ensure a high level of assurance in their application, RSA strongly recommends that customers discontinue use of Dual EC DRBG and move to a different PRNG," the RSA advisory stated. "Technical guidance, including how to change the default PRNG in most libraries, is available in the most current product documentation" on RSA's websites.

New revelations about US spying continue to be released "in dribs and drabs," as President Obama recently complained.

Today's information comes courtesy of Der Spiegel, the Germany weekly magazine. While political discussion in the US has focused on the National Security Agency's deviations from its promise to not gather data on Americans, the international press continues to highlight examples of NSA spying that are perfectly legal, but may well stoke public outrage in other nations.

The new Der Spiegel report describes NSA programs that were focused on the United Nations, and embassies around the world. It's based, like earlier reveals by The Guardian and The Washington Post, on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Back in March, we reported on Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' company Bezos Expeditions, which raised a significant amount of Saturn V F-1 engine components from the floor of the Atlantic ocean. Bezos Expeditions suspected that many of the components they had recovered belonged to not just any Saturn V, but to SA-506—the rocket that carried three men to humankind's first moon landing in July of 1969.

In a blog post this morning, Bezos Expeditions confirmed that careful analysis has revealed a faintly visible serial number stamped on several parts of one of the recovered thrust chambers. That serial number—2044—corresponds with F-1 engine number F-6044, which was installed in the center position as engine #5 in SA-506.

Bezos Expeditions

Bezos Expeditions

Recovery of anything from three miles beneath the ocean's surface is a significant achievement, of course, but the very rocket engines that flew humans to their first lunar landing are obviously of particular historical importance. Bezos and his company plan to restore the components to construct at least one museum-quality engine for public display.

On Thursday afternoon, The Monterey County Herald reported that the US Army was restricting access to the UK version of The Guardian's website. The Herald discovered yesterday that the site was blocked for military employees at the California-based Presidio of Monterey installation and confirmed today that the block was Army-wide.

Employees at the Presidio installation reported to the Herald that they were able to access The Guardian's US site, guardiannews.com, but were blocked from clicking through to entire articles, which redirect to the UK site. This is not the first time the military has blocked access to a news organization; in 2010, the US Air Force blocked access to The New York Times and more than 25 other news organizations that were posting classified material made available by WikiLeaks.

In an e-mail to the Herald, Gordon Van Vleet, an Arizona-based spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM), said that the Army is prohibiting "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks." He continued in his letter:

Submitted by: Unknown

Wheat stem rust goes after its favorite meal.

Evans Lagudah and Zakkie Pretorius

Currently, roughly 20 percent of humanity's caloric intake comes from wheat. Agricultural strains, specialized for bread or pasta production, have been bred for high productivity and resistance to many agricultural pests. But over the past few years, one of those pests, a fungus called wheat stem rust, has evolved the ability to overcome wheat's defenses. Dangerous strains of wheat stem rust were first spotted in Uganda, but are now present elsewhere in Africa, in Yemen, and in some areas of Iran. That's set off an international scramble to find ways of generating a resistant wheat before the rust spreads any further.

By working with uncultivated relatives of agricultural wheat, two teams of scientists have identified a pair of genes, each of which provides partial resistance to the new strain of stem rust. Although each gene can be bred back into commercial wheat strains, the combination of the two is likely to be even more potent, so the researchers are considering putting them on a single DNA construct and then engineering that into various agricultural strains.

Wheat stem rust infections severely limit the plant's productivity and can kill it in severe infections. In the early 1900s, outbreaks in the US would routinely destroy a double-digit percentage of the nation's harvest. The breeding of resistant strains of wheat was therefore a major accomplishment. In 1999, however, researchers in Uganda discovered a new strain of stem rust (Ug99) that could infect resistant crops. Since then, the fungus has spread to other parts of Africa, and resistant strains have been spotted in the Middle East. Tests indicate that roughly 90 percent of the currently cultivated wheat strains are vulnerable to it. In 2005, a group was formed to coordinate international efforts to breed a resistant crop.