Last year Amazon Studios joined the original content game with its first two series, the comedies Betas and Alpha House. Both programs received generally favorable reviews, but they didn’t exactly turn into cultural juggernauts — and meanwhile Netflix was taking victory laps at the Emmys and Golden Globes. For better or worse, prestige has always been earned on the battlefield of drama, and without a House of Cards or Orange is the New Black Amazon was letting Netflix become the de-facto destination for high-quality original programming on the internet.

Today, that’s changed. Amazon is back with a slate of 10 new pilots, using the same crowdsourced process as before: Amazon Prime customers can stream the episodes for free, weigh...

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Evidence of the widening wealth gap: Across America, brands that serve middle class customers are shutting down, while businesses that serve the rich are thriving. Good bye $16.50 dinners at Olive Garden, hello $71 checks at Capital Grille. (via Mitch Wagner)

A new Snowden leak, reported by NBC, documents the UK spy agency GCHQ's attacks on Anonymous, which included Denial-of-Service attacks, which are strictly forbidden under UK law. As the Slashdot story notes, "Regular citizens would face 10 years in prison and enormous fines for committing a DoS / DDoS attack. The same applies if they encouraged or assisted in one. But if you work in the government, it seems like you're an exception to the rule."

NBC has published a minimally redacted version [PDF] of the GCHQ slide-deck detailing the agency's illegal hacking attacks on alleged Anonymous participants.

The presentation gives detailed examples of “humint” (human intelligence) collection from hacktivists known by the on-line names G-Zero, Topiary and pOke, as well as a fourth whose name NBC News has redacted to protect the hacker's identity. The hacktivists were contacted by GCHQ agents posing as fellow hackers in internet chat rooms. The presentation includes transcripts of instant message conversations between the agents and the hackers in 2011.

“Anyone here have access to a website with at least 10,000+ unique traffic per day?” asks one hacktivist in a transcript taken from a conversation that began in an Operation Payback chat room. An agent responds and claims to have access to a porn website with 27,000 users per day. “Love it,” answers the hacktivist. The hackers ask for access to sites with traffic so they can identify users of the site, secretly take over their computers with malware and then use those computers to mount a DDOS attack against a government or commercial website.

A GCHQ agent then has a second conversation with a hacker known as GZero who claims to “work with” the first hacktivist. GZero sends the agent a series of lines of code that are meant to harvest visitors to the agent’s site and make their computers part of a “botnet” operation that will attack other computers.

The “outcome,” says the presentation, was “charges, arrest, conviction.” GZero is revealed to be a British hacker in his early 20s named Edward Pearson, who was prosecuted and sentenced to 26 months in prison for stealing 8 million identities and information from 200,000 PayPal accounts between Jan. 1, 2010 and Aug. 30, 2011. He and his girlfriend were convicted of using stolen credit card identities to purchase take-out food and hotel stays.

War on Anonymous: British Spies Attacked Hackers, Snowden Docs Show [Mark Schone, Richard Esposito, Matthew Cole and Glenn Greenwald/NBC]

(via /.)

Welcome back to our monthly gaming retrospective, this time for January 2014. We've got a good mix of triple-A console-style games and more mobile-friendly casual titles for your consideration, some of which are so bizarre that they have to be played to be understood. We've also got plenty of picks that didn't quite make it to the top of the list, but are still worthy of attention. Check out the profiles below for screenshots, videos, and easy links to the Google Play Store.

• [New Game] Table Top Racing, From The Creator Of Wipeout, Skids Into The Play Store Like An Open Pack Of Micro Machines
• [New Game] Point-And-Click Adventure Detective Grimoire Is Finally On Android More Than A Year After Being Kickstarted
• [New Game] Mini Motor Racing Has Little Cars And Big Races In One Massive Download
• [New Game] Square Enix Releases Final Fantasy VI On Android

[Game Roundup] Our Top Seven Picks For The Best New Games Of January 2014 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Purported pictures of the HTC One 2’s front show what the HTC One successor’s display side and on-screen buttons would look like, although it’s not yet clear whether they’re real images or just Photoshop jobs. The images, posted by MobilTelefon.ru, were discovered on a forum, although that page appears to have been removed, and they seem to show an HTC One-like device, whose display is turned on. The screen appears to have slim bezels, a feature that many phones are expected to employ, including the LG G Pro 2 and the Xperia Z2 in the list.

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Amazon has acquired a gaming studio called Double Helix Games, TechCrunch has learned, and Amazon now confirms. The deal was for both talent and IP, we understand. Financial terms have not been disclosed.

The Irvine, California-based company, founded in 2007 through the merger of two well-known game development shops, The Collective, Inc. and Shiny Entertainment, today employs 75 people who will now become Amazon employees and will continue to operate out of their Orange County home.

News of the deal leaked due to an invitation to joint recruiting event from Amazon and Double Helix Games taking place in L.A. on February 13th. The acquisition announcement was planned to take place at that time, most likely.

Amazon has provided TechCrunch with the following statement regarding the deal:

“Amazon has acquired Double Helix as part of our ongoing commitment to build innovative games for customers.”

The Double Helix deal may fuel to the recent rumors that Amazon is preparing to release its own gaming console in the coming months. Last week, the video game industry blog VG247.com reported that Amazon is planning to launch an Android-powered “dedicated games and entertainment device this year priced below $300… [that] will compete directly with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.” Buzz about an Amazon console has been around for a while: This past summer, the rumor was that the company was planning to debut a Qualcomm-based console system. Amazon declined to comment on the console speculation when reached today.

Of course, Amazon Game Studios also has a presence in Irvine, following the launch of its social game development arm back in 2012. Amazon’s efforts on the gaming front have been fairly quiet since then. The company has released a now-shuttered game called “Living Classics,” which retired last October. The company also has a handful of other titles now, but the Double Helix acquisition will bring more high-profile talent and IP to Amazon. 

Double Helix has a history of creating popular games for nearly 20 years, when you consider the work Shiny and The Collective had done before the merger. Shiny, for example, was the creator of classic like “Earthworm Jim,”
“Sacrifice, MDK” and “Enter the Matrix,” while The Collective had previously put out titles like “Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb,” “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith,” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

As Double Helix, the firm has a decent track record as well. Its most popular game today is “Killer Instinct,” but throughout the years, it has created a number of PC and console games including “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” “Green Latern: Rise of the Manhunters,” “Silent Hill: Homecoming,” and “Front Mission Evolved,” among others. As you can tell by the titles, it specializes in large-scale action games based on blockbuster franchises.

A forthcoming title, “Strider,” is scheduled to launch this month on PS3, but others including “Dirty Harry” and “Harker” are no longer expected to follow.

Amazon says that Double Helix’s current lineup of games and other future developments will be supported, following the acquisition.

Despite launching its own OS, Mozilla wants more of the Android market — the company just announced that it'll release its own Android launcher in the coming weeks, with the Firefox browser built right in. But instead of building a launcher from the ground-up, it's releasing a rebranded version of the just-released EverythingMe launcher instead.

Just like EverythingMe, the Firefox launcher will focus on contextual data to serve up relevant apps and links to the user based on usage patterns and location. Firefox launcher will include the same universal search, smart folders that populate with related apps and content pulled from the internet, and ever-changing "prediction bar" that tries to show you the relevant apps at the right...

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HTC has again signalled its indication to enter the wearables market. Chairwoman Cher Wang told Bloomberg News that the Taiwanese company plans to release a wearable device by the holiday shopping season, following comments by CEO Peter Chou that the category is "critical" for HTC. "Many years ago we started looking at smartwatches and wearables, but we believe that we really have to solve the battery problems and the LCD light problems," said Wang. "These are customer-centric problems."

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Google is rolling out a new feature that pushes YouTube videos to the top of search results. Search for a song and you'll now see a Google Now-like card appear at the top of your results, containing a link to the video for the song as well as information on the artist, album, and release date. As Search Engine Watch reports, the cards look a lot like a playable videos, but they're actually just images that redirect to YouTube.

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January is generally held as a gloomy month, a time when there's nothing but slush on the ground and crap in the movie theaters. But it gave us more than a few fine apps, which you should take the opportunity to peruse. If you don't feel like meticulously combing through our massive bi-weekly app roundups, we've gathered the best of the best right here. Dig in, why don't you?

12Hours

12Hours is one of those ideas that's so brilliantly simple you wonder why no one has done it already.

• TegraZone App Updated To v2.9 With Support For All Devices, Google Play Games Integration, And Better Sorting
• [New App] Udemy Brings On-The-Go Learning To Android, Just Make Sure You Bring Your Wallet
• Dr. Dre's 'Beats' Are Here To Stay, Putting Boom-Chick-A-Boom In Your Phone
• [New App] Beats Music Is Live In The Play Store: 20 Million Songs, Unique Playlist System, Ten Bucks A Month

[App Roundup] Our Top Seven Picks For The Best New Apps Of January 2014 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

New apps need lovin’ too, right? Every day there are thousands of additions to the Google Play Store, but many go unnoticed and never receive the attention they deserve. We’ve shown in the past that this community can discover great apps and launch them to new heights. Our weekly column Fresh Meat highlights new apps with less than 100,000 installs. Browse our new Android app picks below and let us know which ones you enjoy.

EverythingMe Launcher

Description: EverythingMe is a launcher for your Android phone that delivers what you need, when you need it. It anticipates the apps, people and information you’d want, every time you pick up your phone.

 

NBC Olympics Highlights

Description: Experience the best of the 2014 Sochi Olympic Winter Games with the NBC Olympics Highlights and Results app. Get prepared for the Games now by checking out news, video, photos for every sport — all from your Android handheld or tablet device.

 

AutoPebble

Description: AutoPebble is to the Pebble what Tasker is to your Android device. With all its versatility it allows anyone to build mini-apps on their Pebble that can replace many other apps. It’s just like bringing Tasker into your Pebble.

 

Xperia™ Transfer Mobile

Description: Afraid you’ll lose valuable information when switching to an Xperia™? Don’t worry. Xperia™ Transfer Mobile is an ultra-easy, safe and simple app that’ll help you move your contacts, photos and much more from your old Android or iOS device to your new Sony Xperia™.

 

5by

Description: 5by is a personalized, curated video application that sifts through the sea of online video and surfaces the best ones for you in a continuous, effortless stream. Based on mood, social interests and time of day we serve up great videos for you all day long.

 

Cogi – Beyond Notes

Description: Cogi is an easy-to-use, free note taking and voice recording app that allows you to capture the important parts of meetings, lectures and conversations, all while remaining completing engaged, listening to what’s being said.

 

Panadero – Baking Calculator

Description: This app was created to provide hobbyist bakers a simple tool for creating and calculating recipes based on bakers percentages and ingredient mass.

 

My Paid Apps

Description: See a simple list of all the apps you’ve purchased in the Play Store.

 

My Disney Infinity Collection

Description: Track what you own from Disney Infinity in a beautiful & easy way. Track your characters, play sets and power discs as well as challenges.

 

Basecamp – Official App

Description:  The official app for Basecamp, the world’s #1 project management app on the web.

 

No more changing of your system language required

Today's Google Search update may have a few more tricks up its sleeve than we know, but we have found that it enables voice actions for those using U.K. English on their device. Folks outside of the U.S. previously had to set the app's language to U.S. English in order to get Google Now to respond to voice commends, but now our friends across the pond can get in on the action.

Better yet, you even have a response voice of a U.K. English speaker, which completes the entire loop. This is one update you'll want to grab if you've been clamoring for voice actions in the U.K. and are tired of changing to U.S. English just to make it happen.

Israel brings Dead Sea scrolls to life with upgrade of digital archive: Website includes 10,000 new images, more manuscript descriptions and translated content, and a faster search engine

Beautiful photography makes for great wallpapers, but if you're into something a bit more abstract, we've got you covered. Here are nine cool abstract wallpapers to decorate your desktop.

Crystal Clear

Download This Wallpaper (1900x1200) | Picc.it

Torque

Download This Wallpaper (1600x1200) | DeviantART

3D Cube Explosion

Download This Wallpaper (2560x1600) | DeviantART

Galaxy

Download This Wallpaper (1920x1440) | Perfect Hue

Subversion

Download This Wallpaper (1920x1200) | EndEffect

Dreamcatcher

Download This Wallpaper (1600x1200) | DeviantART

Abstract City

Download This Wallpaper (1920x1200) | Wallpapers Shop

Fast Burn

Download This Wallpaper (1920x1200) | DeviantART

Cube Chamber

Download This Wallpaper (1920x1200) | Silky Bastard

GCSB, New Zealand's secret police force has admitted to illegally deleting key evidence related to the raid on Kim Dotcom over his Megaupload service. The spies agree that the evidence was illegally deleted, but claim it was an honest mistake, because the data "aged off" their retention system.

Dotcom last night tweeted the claim, saying: "The GCSB spy agency seems to have deleted evidence relevant to my case against the GCSB for illegally spying on NZ residents.''

He quoted Crown lawyers as saying "some communications have automatically aged off. We propose to include ... those communications which are still recoverable''.

Dotcom claimed lawyers acting for the GCSB told him the material had "aged off'' the system, suggesting it had automatically deleted.

He also posted a video of Prime Minister John Key, who is in charge of the agency, saying: "This is a spy agency. We don't delete things. We archive them.''

GCSB deleted key evidence - Dotcom [David Fisher/NZ Herald]

(via Techdirt)

Amazon's Kindle Worlds, the company's publishing arm for legally-sanctioned fan fiction, is expanding fast. The company announced today that it's adding seven new properties, including GI Joe, Veronica Mars, and the Pretty Little Liars spinoff Ravenswood. That brings the total number of fan fiction franchises available exclusively through Amazon up to 20.

The announcement comes on the 50th anniversary of GI Joe, which is owned by Hasbro. "Hasbro now enters a new segment of the business by embracing the concept of open-source storytelling, and officially unlocking the world of GI Joe to our fans through Amazon’s Kindle Worlds," a Hasbro executive said in a statement, suggesting megabrands are starting to recognize that fanfic is a...

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Senior management at Google is being shifted around, with SVP of Ads & Commerce Susan Wojcicki taking over at YouTube. With that appointment, which was reported by The Information and Re/code, current YouTube boss Salar Kamangar, is expected to move into another role at Google.

The L-Team, as it’s known, is a collection of senior executives leading Google’s key strategic initiatives, all of whom report directly to CEO Larry Page. When Page took control of Google a few years ago, he reorganized the company’s management structure along product lines, appointing a key lieutenant for each.

Members of the L-Team have come and gone since then, shuffling around within Google based on how they align with the company’s product plans and strategic initiatives. Last spring, Page reorganized the management structure again, demoting Android boss Andy Rubin and maps executive Jeff Huber and promoting Ads & Commerce SVP Sridhar Ramaswamy in their place.

With the Ads piece split, it made sense for Wojcicki to shift to another important piece of Google’s business. Wojcicki, after all, has been a key member of the Google team practically since it was founded. By many, she’s considered the most important woman at Google – and for good reason.

She’s been with Google basically from the start: It was Wojcicki’s garage that Page and Sergey Brin began working out of the same month that Google was incorporated in 1998. She was their 16th hire, and was their first marketing manager. Wojcicki was also a key player in the development of AdSense, as well as the acquisitions of YouTube and DoubleClick.

Now she’ll try her hand at running YouTube, which reportedly generated up to $5.6 billion in ad revenue last year. There’s no doubt that Google thinks that could be bigger, especially given the global TV ad market, and it’ll be her job to help drive that growth.

The HTC One features the most beautiful design and the sleekest build of any Android phone that has ever been made. There isn't even really a close second. The handset's gorgeous metal case is contoured perfectly to the hand and the front-facing speakers with micro-drilled metal covers add style and unrivaled sound quality. We even made it official when we named the HTC One the best-designed smartphone of 2013 this past December. As great as the phone is though, it's starting to get a bit outdated in terms of specs — but HTC fans shouldn't worry, of course, because the phone's successor is right around the corner. And now, HTC's upcoming One sequel has been pictured fully assembled for the first time.

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In between creating masterpieces like the Sistine Chapel and “Madonna and Child,” Michelangelo dissected cadavers in the hopes of understanding how the human body worked so he could paint it accurately. He’s not the only one: there has long been a connection between science and art. And it’s true today more than ever, as modern artists use technology for inspiration, inventing ways to give life to code, letting it spill from the screen and onto the canvas. We call this “DevArt,” and this summer, we’re teaming up with the Barbican in London and their Digital Revolution exhibition to celebrate DevArt in an interactive gallery. And we want you to be a part of it.
As part of this exhibition, we’re looking for the next up-and-coming developer artist. This is your opportunity to express your creativity, and to have your work featured in the Barbican and seen by millions of people around the world. To throw your hat in the ring, build a project on the DevArt site and show us what you would create. From there, we’ll pick one creator whose work will sit alongside three of the world’s finest interactive artists who are also creating installations for DevArt: Karsten Schmidt, Zach Lieberman, and the duo Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet.


The exhibition will open at the Barbican this summer. Until then, visit g.co/devart, where you can submit your own project. If you’re not the creative coding type, visit the site to see some incredible art and follow the artists’ creative process—from concept and early sketches to the finished piece—on their respective Project Pages. You'll get a rare look into artists’ ways of working with modern technologies (including some Google products), and maybe even get inspired to create something yourself.

If you had the chance to make your mark in today’s art world with technology as your canvas, what would you create? We’d like you to show us.

Posted by Steve Vranakis, Executive Creative Director, Google Creative Lab

Now with added backstory

With the release date just weeks away now (March in the States, April here), the team behind Divergent have rolled out what they’re calling the final trailer – though we’ve heard this before from studios – that fills in a little more of the backstory. 

Taken from Veronica Roth’s book trilogy, Divergent is set in a dystopian, post-war future (Chicago, in this case) where people are divided into social factions based on their personalities. 

Woodley’s Beatrice “Tris” Prior, however, is different. She doesn’t belong in any one faction, and her divergent nature means she’s a threat to the orderly running of the civilization. Things aren’t easy for those who are identified as different – and by different, we mean dangerous. {New Divergent Character Poster}

She joins the Dauntless (courageous) faction but there, together with friends and her mysterious, handsome trailer Four (Theo James), Tris must face the perils ahead and figure out the plans of Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet), the stern figurehead she’ll have to defeat. Can she survive and win out?

With Miles Teller, Jai Courtney, Zoe Kravitz, Maggie Q, Ansel Elgort, Mekhi Phifer, Ray Stevenson and Ashley Judd among the cast, Divergent hits the UK on April 4, following a March 21 US release.

When The X-Files creator Chris Carter first detailed his next project, The After, he said it would be "more fun" if its plot details were "kept a mystery." The first trailer for its hour-long pilot does an excellent job of maintaining that mystery. It shows a panicked crowd in downtown Los Angeles dealing with the effects of some unseen disaster that causes windows to crack, helicopters to crash into each other, and people to plead with police officers to help them get home to their families. Carter, not yet elaborating on exactly happens to cause such panic, says the show "explores human frailty, possibility, terror, and the triumph of the human spirit," following the unspecified catastrophe.

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Professor Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley, thinks he has been spied on by shadowy forces for 14 years because of his study of frog genitalia. Strangely, Professor Tyrone Hayes is right. Hayes' work on the adverse effects herbicide atrazine can have on amphibious populations drew a reaction from the herbicide's maker, Syngenta. The company, who originally paid for Hayes to study the effects of the chemical before his findings strained relations between the two parties, has engaged in a campaign to smear Hayes' reputation. The New Yorker explains what happens when a scientist draws the ire of corporation as vast as Syngenta, detailing how the firm belittled minor mistakes in studies to refocus attention away from...

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The European Commission announced today that it has reached a tentative agreement with Google to end a three-year antitrust investigation into how the company displays search results. Under the proposed agreement, Google will display search results from three of its competitors alongside results promoting its own services. Over the coming weeks, the EC will determine whether to make the agreement legally binding, after consulting with Google competitors. By settling with the EC, Google would presumably avoid paying a fine of up to $5 billion, or 10 percent of its 2012 revenue.

European regulators began investigating Google in 2010, amid concerns that the search giant uses its market dominance to promote its own services while burying...

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Mail Online: Richard Bull, who is best known for starring on the '70s TV series Little House On The Prairie, has died at age 89.

According to People, the actor passed away on Monday in Calabasas, California but the cause of death has not been revealed.

He played shop owner Nels Oleson on Prairie and appeared for the show's entire run, from 1974 to 1983.

The UK government's Health and Social Care Information Centre quietly announced plans to share all patient records held by the National Health Service with private companies, from insurers to pharmaceutical companies. The information sharing is on an opt-out basis, so if you don't want your "clinical records, mental health consultations, drug addiction rehabilitation details, dsexual health clinic attendance and abortion procedures" shared, along with your "GP records, HS numbers, post-codes, gender, date of birth," you need to contact your doctor and opt out of the process.

This is a complex issue. Large data-sets are the lifeblood of epidemiology and evidence-based care and policy, and the desire to extract useful health information from this data is a legitimate one.

However, it's clear that no one involved in the process gives a damn about privacy. These data-sets -- which will be sold on the open market to commercial operators -- are "anonymized" and "pseudonymized" through processes that don't work, have never worked, and are well-documented to be without any basis in reality.

And that's the thing that brings the whole enterprise out of the realm of legitimate scientific project and into the realm of corporatist hucksterism. Once the architects of this project announced that its privacy protections would be based on junk science, they lost any claim they had to operating in good faith.

Effectively, the managers of this programme have said, "We can't figure out how to protect the most private, potentially damaging facts of your life, so we're not going to try." It is pure cynicism, and it makes me furious. It brings the whole field of evidence-based medicine into disrepute. It is a scandal. And as it goes ahead, it will spectacularly destroy the lives of random people in the UK through the involuntary, totally foreseeable disclosure of health information, in ways that make the general public leery of any participation in this kind of inquiry.

If you set about to discredit the open data movement, you could do no better than this.

---

Update: As if that wasn't bad enough, Noemi adds, "The contract for handling and managing the care data has been given to ATOS. This is the same company whose disability benefit assessment has been found to be flawed and unacceptable in 40% of cases by the Audit Commission." Here's more.

HSCIC's own guide to confidentiality points out the potential for messy dilemmas. For instance, the guide mentions that "removing the individual's name, age, address and other personal identifiers may not be sufficient to effectively anonymise the information." Therefore, even so-called "green" data can leak personal health information.

And while HSCIC attempts to fix legal issues by stating the information should always be shared in accordance with the law and organisations must abide by legal provisions which may ban or limit attempts to re-identify confidential information, plans for HSCIC to publicly track client compliance are yet to be revealed.

The types of privacy and legal issues that the Spine database creates are immense. For instance, under Section 33A and section 41 of the UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, any disclosure of information relating to assisted conception (for example information about gamete donors and people receiving treatment) is usually a criminal offense. How exactly this information would be safeguarded is currently unknown.

Though privacy advocates have bemoaned the lack of public clarity and transparency over exactly which organisations will be able to buy particularly sensitive datasets, two companies may already have a head-start to the treasure trove: MedRed and BT.

Care.data and the murky US partnership that puts your health data at risk [Asher Wolf/Wired UK]

Hand warmers are great for those cold winter days when you just have to be outside. Slip them into your gloves or pockets to keep your hands nice and toasty. You can make your own DIY version with stuff you probably have in the kitchen right now.

We've shown you how to make instant hand warmers using calcium chloride ice-melt pellets from the hardware store and those are great. But if you want something reusable or just want a fun, new experiment to try, all you need is some baking soda, white vinegar, and a stove.

Create HOT ICE Hand Warmers! A Simple Tutorial | HouseholdHacker (via YouTube)

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...

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Since launch, the Humble Indie Bundle has expanded its mission considerably, releasing everything from music to novels on a pay-what-you-want basis. Its latest bundle, though, is laser-focused on one man: game designer Sid Meier. The Humble Sid Meier Bundle includes the complete edition of Civilization III and Civilization IV, as well as 2013 tactical dogfighting game Sid Meier's Ace Patrol, followup Ace Patrol: Pacific Skies, and 2006 business sim Sid Meier's Railroads. Ace Patrol was originally released on iOS to fairly good reviews before coming to PC, but only the PC port is included in the bundle.

As usual, pay more than the average (currently around $6.75), and you'll get Civilization V as well as its Gods and Kings DLC,...

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A lot of people are about to lose their ebooks. (Thanks, Florian!)

Following months of speculation, Microsoft will be investing $15 million in Foursquare. The Wall Street Journal reports the investment comes with a "strategic partnership" between the companies, one that will help Foursquare sustain its business and give Microsoft access to a trove of location-based data.

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