Maxim Bange

Social media has played a critical role in Syria, where three years of violent civil war and a government ban on foreign journalists have rendered objective reporting scarce. Facebook has proven to be particularly popular among the non-violent activists who first launched protests against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, but as Michael Pizzi writes in a recent piece for the Atlantic, many of their pages are now being shuttered. Some pages were shut down for posting violent images from the bloody conflict or alleged calls to violence — in violation of Facebook policy — though some blame the Syrian Electronic Army for the shutdown, accusing the pro-Assad group of flooding the social network's reporting system with complaints, even...

Continue reading…

Chris Woods

Twenty-five years after the Web's inception, its creator has urged the public to reengage with its original design: a decentralized Internet that remains open to all.

Speaking with Wired editor David Rowan at an event launching the magazine's March issue, Tim Berners-Lee said that although part of this is about keeping an eye on for-profit Internet monopolies such as search engines and social networks, the greatest danger is the emergence of a balkanized Web.

"I want a Web that's open, works internationally, works as well as possible, and is not nation-based," Berners-Lee told the audience, which included Martha Lane Fox, Jake Davis (aka Topiary) and Lily Cole. He suggested one example to the contrary: "What I don't want is a Web where the Brazilian government has every social network's data stored on servers on Brazilian soil. That would make it so difficult to set one up."

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Microsoft is currently preparing a PC-focused "Update 1" to Windows 8.1. While an early version of the update leaked online earlier this week, the software maker is now believed to be preparing a final release in April. Initial reports suggested Microsoft would aim to deliver Windows 8.1 Update 1 in March, but ZDNet now claims this has shifted a month to April 8th. That date aligns with Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday round of fixes, and it’s rumored that the company will distribute the update through Windows Update rather than the Windows Store. It also aligns with Microsoft's Build conference, which will be held between April 2nd and 4th. Microsoft is expected to announce and detail the update at Build, before releasing it...

Continue reading…

Google said today that Susan Wojcicki, an early employee who has been serving as a senior vice president overseeing advertising and commerce, will now run YouTube. Salar Kamangar, who has run the video service since 2010, will stay at Google working on unspecified "early-stage projects," according to Re/code. As Re/code noted earlier, the move puts a prominent advertising executive at YouTube in the wake of publishers on the service complaining about the difficulties they have making profits on the site.

In a statement sent to The Verge, Google CEO Larry Page was vague on what the change might mean for YouTube. "Salar and the whole YouTube team have built something amazing," Page wrote. "YouTube is a billion person global community...

Continue reading…

spaceexp:

Northern Lights - Taken by a member of the ISS Crew

Shawn Campbell

In its first quarterly earnings statement since the company’s initial public offering last year, Twitter is definitely not soaring.

Twitter reported a net loss of over $511 million in the fourth quarter of 2013 and ended the year with a total net loss of over $645 million. However, the company more than doubled its revenue in 2013 when compared to the previous year, reaching $664 million.

In after-hours trading, its stock price has fallen over 16 percent as of this writing.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A new-to-humans flu virus killed a 73-year-old woman from the Jiangxi province in China, on Dec. 6.

At the time, the doctors knew it was a H10N8 bird flu virus that killed her. But, they've just published new findings about it — it has picked up some new genes from the H9N2 flu virus. And these genes could make it more dangerous to humans.

"A second case of H10N8 was identified in Jiangxi Province on Jan. 26," study author Mingbin Liu said in the news release. "This is of great concern because it reveals that the H10N8 virus has continued to circulate and may cause more human infections in the future."

They published their results in the journal The Lancet on Feb. 5.

The death was the third in 2013 from a new strain of bird flu virus that had never infected people. The others were the new H7N9 virus and and H6N1 virus.

A mysterious death

The woman in question had recently visited a live poultry market, which is probably where she got the virus. She had been admitted to the hospital on Nov. 30 with severe pneumonia.

A second patient was reported in January, but she is in stable condition in the hospital, according to the WHO. Luckily, none of the people either patient had been in contact with were sickened, suggesting the virus can't spread easily between people yet.

When they sequenced the virus from the first patient, they found that it had several genes from a different kind of flu virus, H9N2. These genes are very similar to those in the human-infecting versions of H5N1 and H7N9, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, at the University of Minnesota.

The virus also has a genetic mutation that was previously linked with increased virulence in mammals, the researchers said.

These genetic changes make the virus easier to track, because it's different from the virus that researchers have previously found in live poultry markets and wild birds.

More flu?

An increase in new bird flu viruses being detected in humans could be a result of the Chinese government's increased surveillance for avian flu infections after the arrival of H7N9, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research And Policy at the University of Minnesota. That means authorities are more likely to test for and report infections with these viruses.

We probably missed these infections before, only realizing a new virus had jumped to humans when it reached a larger scale. Science journalist Alan Dove wrote on Twitter back when the case first broke: "People have probably been dying of sporadic bird flu spillovers for eons, but we only noticed the ones that became pandemics."

Though it might result in some scare-tactics from the media, watching and monitoring these small outbreaks isn't necessarily a bad thing. We can now watch these infections before they kill hundreds of people, and track if they are getting worse.

A tale of three bird flus

In addition to H10N8, the bird flu strain H6N1 also infected a human for the first time in 2013. That patient made a full recovery after a stint in the hospital, and doesn't seem to have infected others, and no other people have shown up infected with the virus.

A much bigger deal is the H7N9 bird flu that has been making a comeback. It was also first found in humans in April 2013. More than 250 patients ended up in hospitals and more than 70 died. While there was a lull in infections with the virus, it is again on the rise.

The original bird flu virus, H5N1, is also still circulating in China and other areas of Asia, where it's sickened many people in Cambodia and Indonesia, according to the WHO. Other viruses currently circulating in Asia include the swine flu H1N1, the "normal" human flu H2N3, and select strains of Influenza B, a related virus.

SEE ALSO: The Frightening Story Of A Man Who Bought A Chicken And Then Died Of Bird Flu

Join the conversation about this story »

This is BFL's top-of-the-line bitcoin miner, selling for over $22,000.

Butterfly Labs

One of the world’s most mysterious Bitcoin-related companies is now facing its first civil lawsuit in a United States federal court, with many more likely on the way.

Last summer, Ars reported on Butterfly Labs (BFL), which makes ASIC-based Bitcoin miners. In other words, BFL builds little boxes with specialized chips that do nothing but compute hashes in the Bitcoin blockchain—a process which can lead to real money for the miners. Given that the value of Bitcoin has skyrocketed in recent months (hovering around $820 per bitcoin as of this writing), mining coins when their value is lower is clearly profitable.

Martin Meissner, a German-Polish man who lives in China, placed an order for a BFL miner back in March 2013 but ultimately never received his order. He alleges that he spent over $62,000 to order two 1500 gigahash-per-second Bitcoin miners. To date, he has not received a refund for his payment. His lawsuit, filed in December 2013, accuses BFL of breach of contract, fraud, and negligent representation.

Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (United Nations Alliance of Civilizations / Flickr)

The Turkish government this week passed strict new legislation that makes it easier for authorities to shut down websites and access personal data, in what is widely seen as a move to strengthen internet censorship and surveillance at a time of heightened political tensions. The bill was passed late Wednesday by the Turkish Parliament and is expected to be signed into law by President Abdullah Gul.

Supporters of the measure say it will help protect children from "items on the internet that encourage drug addiction, sexual abuse and suicide," and that it was designed to strengthen privacy protection. But opposition leaders and human rights...

Continue reading…

You probably don’t spend much time thinking about the computer in your car, but a pair of Spanish security researchers sure do. In preparation for next month’s Black Hat Asia security conference in Singapore, Javier Vazquez-Vidal and Alberto Garcia Illera have assembled a small electronic device that can leave a vehicle’s computer system open to attack. “It can take five minutes or less to hook up and then walk away,” Vidal says. It can also be built from off-the-shelf components for less than $20.

What the gizmo can actually do depends on the car. The team says that they’ve wired the CAN Hacking Tool (named for the Controller Area Network bus it exploits) into four vehicles, and have used it to wirelessly manipulate lights, set off alarms, control power windows and even activate the vehicle’s brakes. By the time the conference starts, they hope to outfit the prototype with a GSM radio, making it possible to control vehicle’s systems from virtually anywhere. Still, Vidal says they don’t want to aid any nefarious activities, so the hacking tool’s source code is going to remain private for now — but they do hope their demonstration at Black Hat Asia will get the attention of automakers. “A car is a mini network,” Illera said. “And right now there’s no security implemented.

Filed under: Transportation

Comments

Source: Forbes

The post Your car’s computer system can be hacked with off-the-shelf parts appeared first on AIVAnet.

Aston Martin is recalling 17,590 cars after discovering that they contain counterfeit parts. The recall affects around 75 percent of the cars produced by Aston Martin since November, 2007, and stems from the discovery that a Chinese sub-supplier allegedly used a counterfeit plastic to produce part of the cars' gas pedal.

It's feared that the counterfeit material may cause the pedal arm to break, although Aston Martin stresses that there have been no reports of accidents related to the fault. Should the pedal break, it's likely the engine would return to idle and the car would slow to a stop — a danger especially if driving on a highway. Only the new Vanquish coupe and Volante are entirely exempt from the recall. Replacing the faulty...

Continue reading…

throren:

Don’t mess with Gimli

Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri had already ordered the group in May 2013 to disband and return to Iraq, and announced that another jihadist group, the Al-Nusra Front, was Al-Qaeda's official branch in war-torn Syria.

The general command of Al-Qaeda rammed home the point in its late Sunday statement.

"Al-Qaeda announces it is not linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, as it was not informed of its creation... (and) did not accept it," the statement said.

ISIL "is not a branch of Al-Qaeda, has no links to it, and the (Al-Qaeda) group is not responsible for its acts," it added.

Jihadists were initially welcomed by some rebels in Syria's conflict, but allegations of brutal abuses against civilians as well as rival opposition fighters has sparked a backlash.

Rebels have accused ISIL of seeking to consolidate power rather than fighting the regime, and even suggested the group was serving the regime's interests.

Al-Qaeda also criticized ISIL's mode of operations, saying jihadists should "be part of the nation" and avoid "any action that could lead to the oppression of jihadists, Muslims or non-Muslims."

Jihadists must "not rush to announce emirates and states... and impose them on people," said the statement.

In recent weeks, ISIL consolidated its grip on the northern city of Raqa, the only provincial capital to fall out of regime control since the outbreak of Syria's uprising in March 2011, imposing their strict version of Sharia law on residents.

It also issued four statements ordering women to wear the niqab in public, forbidding the sale of cigarettes and narghile (water pipe) products, banning music and making attendance of Friday prayers compulsory.

The tensions erupted in early January into armed clashes between ISIL and other rebel groups, including Islamist fighters.

"We affirm our disavowal from the sedition that is occurring in Syria between factions of jihadists, and from the blood that was shed by any party," Sunday's statement said.

In some cases, Al-Nusra Front participated in clashes against ISIL, though it has largely remained out of the fighting and has called for reconciliation.

In an audio message on January 22, Zawahiri called for an end to clashes between groups fighting to oust Syria's regime.

More than 1,400 people have been killed in the rebel-jihadist clashes.

Join the conversation about this story »

Business-to-business (B2B) marketers rely heavily on social media; 87% said they use social media as a content marketing tactic, according to newly released survey results from the Content Marketing Institute. It was the number one content marketing technique cited by respondents.

The Institute surveyed 1,200 B2B marketers located in North America. 

Content marketing typically refers to the creation and distribution of relevant content designed to attract clients. It can include articles, blog posts, videos, and webcasts, and a variety of other information-heavy marketing materials. 

Currently, LinkedIn is the most popular social network for B2B marketers. Among marketers who use social media as a tactic, 91% said they use LinkedIn to distribute content. LinkedIn encourages its users to share B2B content and to form groups based on one's industry and profession. The social network also ranked as the most effective social platform among B2B marketers; 62% of those who used it deemed it effective.

However, B2B content marketers use an average of six social media platforms, according to the Institute's survey, and Twitter and Facebook are top among them, with each used by more than eight of out 10 B2B marketers.

In an effort to monetize that usage and capture more B2B marketing spending, Facebook recently announced that beginning in March advertisers will be able to target its users based on their employer and job title. This will help B2B marketers leverage Facebook's audience of 1.2 billion people. 

Twitter doesn't have dedicated marketing products for B2B marketers, but the company recently published data showing that users who see a tweet from a B2B tech brand are 47% more likely to visit that brand's website, as opposed to those who had not seen the tweet. This indicates that there is a large B2B audience on Twitter, and that B2B marketers should be using the social network to connect with potential leads.

LinkedIn's marketing product, called marketing solutions, is a favorite of B2B marketers, and it generated $88.5 million (23% of the company's revenue) in the third quarter of 2013. If Twitter and Facebook become more important to B2B marketing professionals, they could take a considerable share of that business from LinkedIn.

Download the chart and data in Excel. 

Join the conversation about this story »

Canadian snowboarder Sebastien Toutant took this picture of a sign hanging in one of the Sochi bathrooms.

There shall be no (in clockwise order): peeing all over the place, pooping in the top part, jamming things in there (?), fishing, or vomiting.

Noted:

Join the conversation about this story »

It looks like Sony might be narrowing its focus a bit — according to a Nikkei report, the company is contemplating selling its personal computer division to a Japanese investment fund, though it sounds like the VAIO brand would live on in a limited fashion. Sony would reportedly keep a small stake in a new venture built from the sale and continue to operate in markets where the brand is well-known — but otherwise it would exit the market in most countries. However, the VAIO business would continue to operate in Sony's home country of Japan, with a specific focus on the business market.

While the sale to Japan Industrial Partners (estimated to be between $391 million and $489 million) isn't a done deal yet, it sounds like it could be...

Continue reading…

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane has a book coming in March on Apple called "Haunted Empire, Apple After Steve Jobs".

Kane was a great Apple reporter at the Journal, and the post-Steve Jobs era should be great subject material for a book. We've been excited to see what she would turn up.

It looks like her book will not be kind to Tim Cook's Apple. In a post for the New Yorker, she has a brutal take down of Apple in the post-Jobs era. This isn't anything we haven't heard before, but coming from someone that spent years working on a book about Apple, it carries a little more weight:

Apple’s supporters point to the company’s billions of dollars in quarterly profit and its tens of billions in revenue as proof that it continues to thrive. But Apple’s employees again know differently, despite the executive team’s best efforts to preserve Jobs’s legacy. People who shouldn’t be hired are being hired (like Apple’s former retail chief, John Browett, who tried to incorporate big-box-retailer sensibilities into Apple’s refined store experience). People who shouldn’t leave are leaving, or, in the case of the mobile-software executive Scott Forstall, being fired.

Mistakes, in turn, are being made: Apple Maps was a fiasco, and ads, like the company’s short-lived Genius ads and last summer’s self-absorbed manifesto ad, have been mediocre. Apple’s latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 7, looks pretty but is full of bugs and flaws. As for innovation, the last time Apple created something that was truly great was the original iPad, when Jobs was still alive.

Read more at the New Yorker >

Join the conversation about this story »

Microsoft announced its third CEO in the company's 38-year history today. Satya Nadella succeeds Steve Ballmer and takes over immediately with a focus on "cloud and mobile first." While the trio of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella have been busy with today's announcement, they took some time out today to stand on stage together and address more than 100,000 Microsoft employees.

Continue reading…

BitBurgers is one of the few businesses that accepts Dogecoin.

Cory Doctorow

For the last two months, developers and users of Dogecoin, the shiba-themed altcoin (alternative Bitcoin), have been trying to hash out whether it should be an inflationary or deflationary currency. On Saturday, Jackson Palmer, the creator of Dogecoin, wrote on Github that the developer team would keep the code as it is—allowing for some limited inflation.

Most altcoins, as they’ve been designed so far, are deflationary. This means there’s a hard cap on the number of coins that will ever be in existence. Bitcoin, for example, is designed to not have any more bitcoins come into existence after 2040. Other variants (Litecoin) have similar setups. However, one of the downsides of deflation is that it essentially encourages hoarding, as the perceived real value of the currency increases over time. Accordingly, academic researchers showed last year that 64 percent of all bitcoins (PDF) have never been spent.

As Palmer wrote:

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Philip Seymour was found dead in his West Village apartment this weekend of an apparent drug overdose.

As his Hollywood colleagues mourn the actor's loss, many are still left wondering what happens to Hoffman's many projects he had in the works.

Hoffman had a fairly hefty role in "The Hunger Games" franchise, having just been introduced as game master Plutarch Heavensbee in November's super successful "Catching Fire," which earned nearly $860 million at the box office.

At the time of his death, Hoffman was just finishing up shooting on "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2," but Lionsgate says his passing won't affect either film's Nov. 21, 2014 and Nov. 20, 2015 release date.

According to Lionsgate, the majority of Hoffman’s scenes had been completed, with just seven days left to shoot on “Mockingjay — Part 2.”

"The Hunger Games: Mockingjay" cast and crew released a joint statement saying, “Philip Seymour Hoffman was a singular talent and one of the most gifted actors of our generation. We’re very fortunate that he graced our ‘Hunger Games’ family. Losing him in his prime is a tragedy, and we send  our deepest condolences to Philip’s family.”

Meanwhile, Variety reports "Hoffman was also attached to direct the Prohibition era drama “Ezekiel Moss,” which Exclusive Media was set to start selling at the European Film Market in Berlin" but due to the circumstances, "the company released a statement saying it will not be presenting the film to buyers, 'while producers explore the next steps for the film.'"

But with five projects currently in the works, Hoffman had an additional two in the can.

Thriller “A Most Wanted Man,” co-starring Rachel McAdams and Robin Wright, is scheduled for an August release, while IFC has yet to finalize release plans for “God’s Pocket,” which Hoffman promoted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

SEE ALSO: Hollywood Reacts To Philip Seymour Hoffman's Shocking Death

Join the conversation about this story »

Silk Road is certainly the most famous place online to buy your less-than-legal materials — the site operates on the TOR network, which anonymizes its traffic, and conducts all transactions in Bitcoin, the equally anonymous digital currency.

The site became even more famous after the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the alleged owner and operator, who was charged with facilitating drug deals.

Now a new marketplace is up and running. It's called Utopia, and it has Silk Road users intrigued.

Users report that the site loads much more quickly than Silk Road (perhaps a function of it being a newer site not yet discovered by the swarm). Additionally, the site doesn't have the same CAPTCHA login error that's been driving Silk Road users nuts.

There are few differences of substance here. It's still a place to buy stuff when you don't want the seller (or parents, teachers, and law enforcement) to know who you are. Time will tell if it grows enough for Silk Road to feel any sort of pinch, or for law enforcement to take an interest.

In the meantime, here is what you can see on the site.

SEE ALSO: I Stopped Using Regular Banks For Two Weeks — And I'm Never Going Back

Here's the main welcome page. Browse categories on the left or get shopping immediately with the items that appear.

Here's a look at the current listings for weed for sale.

This is a listing for an ounce of weed, going for ~$300.

If you caught our recent coverage of the huge Star Swarm demo, you’ll know that AMD’s Mantle programming tool has already proven itself capable of radically transforming a real-time strategy game. But the console-inspired API has been claimed to deliver performance benefits in FPS games too, starting with Battlefield 4, and the first independent evidence of this is now starting to trickle out. AnandTech and HotHardware have used almost-final Mantle drivers to achieve frame-rate gains of at least 7-10 percent in BF4, rising to 30 percent with some configurations, by doing away with the need for Microsoft’s relatively inefficient DirectX drivers.

In general, it looks like systems with weaker CPUs stand to benefit the most, because Mantle uses the graphics processor in such a way as to reduce CPU bottlenecks. We’ll get a better idea of the size of the improvement once Mantle is released to the public and tested on a wider variety of systems, including laptops and desktops with low-end or integrated AMD GPUs, but nevertheless, these early results bode well for those who are trying to eke better frame rates out of older, cheaper or smaller gaming rigs.

Filed under: Gaming, AMD

Comments

Source: AnandTech, HotHardware

The post Battlefield 4 gets even prettier with new AMD drivers appeared first on AIVAnet.

Seattle Seahawks fans at the Super Bowl littered the field with Skittles following a touchdown by Marshawn Lynch.

A Reuters photographer captured a great image of stadium workers collecting the candy off the turf.

Lynch recently signed an endorsement deal with Skittles after years of consuming the candy prior to games. Lynch's mother originally started giving the star running back Skittles when he was playing Pop Warner football as a child. She would call them "power pellets."

Join the conversation about this story »

Het Voedingscentrum bindt samen met Albert Heijn de strijd aan tegen voedselverspilling. Er worden vanaf vandaag 1 miljoen maatbekers verspreid via de supermarktketen zodat de juiste portie kan worden bereid.

Staatssecretaris Sharon Dijksma krijgt vanochtend een exemplaar van het zogeheten Eetmaatje, dat een week lang wordt verspreid bij de aankoop van een pak AH pasta, rijst of couscous.

Aanbevolen portie

Op de maatbeker, die met subsidie van Economische Zaken is gemaakt, staat aangegeven hoeveel rijst of pasta nodig is per persoon. Er wordt met streepjes ook per pasta-soort aangegeven wat de aanbevolen portie is.

Volgens officiële cijfers belandt ongeveer 14 procent van de boodschappen in Nederland ongebruikt in de vuilnisbak. In totaal wordt elk jaar voor zo'n 2,5 miljard euro aan voedsel weggegooid; zo'n 50 kilo per persoon.

This week we have four newcomers in our chart.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is the most downloaded movie this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

The December 2008 Burger King advertisement "Whopper Virgins" is making the rounds on the Internet again, possibly because of the lead up to the Super Bowl and all this attention around original ads.

The idea was that Burger King would send a team of documentarians into some of the remotest corners of civilized society — In Greenland, Romania, Thailand — toting with them the means to deliver Whoppers and Big Macs.

"We wanted to see how the Whopper would perform in a world that didn't have ad or marketing awareness or any sentimental attachments" to either brand, Russ Klein, president of global marketing, strategy and innovation at Burger King Holdings told The WSJ.

The producers also brought an unbiased judge with them to make sure the two brands of burgers were made and delivered according to specifications.

The product of the campaign ended up being closer to a documentary than a commercial. Its impact on society stirred outrage at first. Rights groups claimed — truthfully — that the millions of dollars spent making a movie could have gone to ending hunger.

They also leveled the charge that Burger King visited areas stricken by hunger, and that the company deliberately omitted mention this detail — Burger King denied that charge, stating that food in those areas was "bountiful."

Whatever the case, the ad ending up being profound outside of just dollars and cents; watching people spend minutes trying to wrap their heads around the hamburger, then realizing they've been paid to take part in a survey.

So they have to eat it.

Then the people try to figure out how to eat it.

The results are awkward in a way that forces the viewer to try and comprehend what it means to grow up in a society completely devoid of hamburgers.

Such a society is very difficult to find, admits one of the producers, certainly "nowhere" in America because of America's "exposure to advertising."

Strange, you recognizing their ignorance is the same as recognizing the face in the mirror.

Truly an interesting little case study into advertising and society, intentional or not.

Watch:

For comparison, here's Andy Warhol eating a hamburger:

Join the conversation about this story »

Microsoft is airing its first national Super Bowl advert on Sunday. While the software giant has been busy backing the Seattle Seahawks, it has also found the time to create a series of "empowering" videos that mark a fresh marketing approach for the company. It’s easy to think of Microsoft as a corporate giant that has missed mobile and tablets, but the reality is that millions of people still rely on its vast array of software products for their daily work. That’s the message that Microsoft is trying to hammer home during the Super Bowl this year.

Microsoft’s Super Bowl ad will run for 60 seconds during Sunday’s game, showing people using the company's software for the greater good. The software maker isn’t revealing its...

Continue reading…

If Dark Souls 2 players want downloadable content, they should speak up.

Producer Takeshi Miyazoe told OXM that the development team at From Software is focusing on finishing the game, which is set for a March 11 release. From isn't opposed to expanding Dark Souls 2 through DLC, and it wouldn't be the first for the series: The original Dark Souls received one DLC expansion, Artorias of the Abyss.

Though there don't seem to be any current plans for DLC, fan reaction could convince the developer to create it.

"There is definitely potential, I think," Miyazoe said. "Again, it's all about fan feedback. Right now we are concentrating on completing what we've got, but I think there are next steps on how we can expand on Dark Souls 2.

"So...

Continue reading…