Bethesda's Dragonborn DLC for The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim adds some very welcome new environments to the game, though it falls short on delivering enjoyable dragon mounts.

Let’s just clear the air right off the bat: riding on the back of a dragon is not fun at all. There, I said it. And I feel so much better now. The new Dragonborn DLC for Bethesda Softworks’ 2011 RPG hit The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim introduces dragon mounts at the end of the moderately lengthy campaign, but the reward isn’t really a suitable cap on the journey you’ll take. Fortunately, that journey is an excellent one, highlighted by a brand new land to explore and an assortment of secondary quests that add up to a great, big chunk of “more Skyrim.”

Much like the earlier Dawnguard DLC, there’s no indication when you first fire up your post-Dragonborn download save that there’s new content to be had. All of the pieces are there, and a knowledgeable player will be able to immediately head to Windhelm and hire a boat to the island of Solstheim, but the more proper DLC introduction comes when a gang of dragon-masked cultists attack without warning. They’re dealt with easily, and a quick search of their leader’s corpse reveals that they’ve been sent with one specific purpose: killing Skyrim’s Dragonborn hero.

Tracing the cultists back to their point of origin brings you to the island of Solstheim, a sprawling, mountainous landscape that was last seen in the Bloodmoon expansion pack (remember those?) for Morrowind. Longtime Elder Scrolls fans will no doubt pick up on familiar links between this DLC and the earlier expansion, but no prior knowledge of Solstheim is required. This is, for all intents and purposes, and entirely new open world environment for you to explore with lots of secrets to be found and 30+ new fast travel locations to unlock on your map.

It’s clear as you explore early on that something is amiss on the island of Solstheim. The natives seem normal for parts of the day, only to suddenly zone out and wander off to a nearby construction site established around an unusual rock formation. The island is dotted with these and the situation is the same wherever you go. Try to talk to someone working near a rock formation and they’ll respond in a flat monotone with some obscure phrase that sounds almost like a prayer.

You eventually come to learn that Miraak, the very first Dragonborn of legend, has returned in some form, and that he’s up to something nefarious. As the full picture comes into focus, your quest brings you from the shores of Solstheim to the surreal Daedric realm of Apocrypha, the home  of Hermaeus Mora. This god-like being and his home realm are a clear homage to the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos. Tentacles stretch down from the yellow-tinted sky and fantastical nightmare creatures – the likes of which you haven’t seen in Skyrim before – wink into existence without warning.

Solstheim and Apocrypha together are the marquee features in Dragonborn. This is the heftiest DLC offering for Skyrim yet in terms of purely new content, and the new locations in particular are a joy to explore. New enemy types, such as the giant-sized, Creature from the Black Lagoon-faced Lurker and the aggressive, pack-oriented Ash Spawns throw up some added challenge, but the new land is the clear-cut star – as it should be for a game like Skyrim, whose greatest rewards are built on exploration.

The entire island can be circled in fairly short order, but an assortment of quests ensure that you’ll see every inch of it. The main quest is good for 5-6 hours of play, but a faction-length second questline focused on the bloody politics of dark elves offers another sizable chunk of narrative as well. Then there are the many one-offs tasks that you’ll acquire as you talk to people, including a couple of faction-specific ones for Thieves Guild members and werewolves. Rounding things out is a new player house, built into the most unusual of locations.

Once again, we come back to the environment. Solstheim is just as much a joy to discover as Skyrim was before it. There’s a markedly different flavor to the snowy, mountainous terrain, especially in the handful of settled areas that you’ll visit. It’s more than that though. A great disaster befell Solstheim at some unspecified time before your arrival, and evidence of the catastrophe is spread across the whole of the island. You’ll come across many unfinished stories as you explore, and while some feed into the secondary tasks that you can take on, many others are simply left a mystery, allowing you to fill in the blanks based on what you see and read. Bethesda’s talent for filling its open worlds with a sense of discovery is very much at the forefront of Dragonborn.

The only real mis-step, as mentioned before, is the dragon riding. The quest-related shout that allows you to tame the great beasts can be used later on any standard dragon spawn (i.e. not a named dragon). Saddling up is easy enough, but Lair-comes-to-Skyrim this is not. Your tamed dragon will always fly along a set flight path in a lazy circle, and while you can fast-travel to new locations while on the back of the winged lizard, you can’t actually steer its movements in any way. The feel is ultimately that of a high fantasy Disney World ride, with the added bonus of being able to shoot spells at enemies if they happen to fall within range of your mount’s flight path.

To put all of that in another, more concise way: horseback riding is more exciting than dragonback riding. It’s a shame, the lone proper negative in an otherwise commendable expansion of Skyrim‘s world. It isn’t enough to make the DLC entirely skippable — there’s a lot of great content here for sure — but you’ll definitely want to think carefully about your purchase of dragonback riding is a major factor in your decision-making. Other than that, The Elder Scrolls’ return to Solstheim is a triumphant one and it makes a good case for immersing yourself once again in this fan-favorite 2011 release.

Managed to pick up a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 from Verizon only to find you are now stuck with a locked bootloader? The good news is that Adam Outler has now revealed how to unlock your Note 2 via XDA TV.

Recently Verizon has become very aggressive about locking up bootloaders with smartphones featured through their wireless service. The Note 2 was in particular known for being locked down tight, but Adam Outler further proves if there is a will, there is a way.

While the root method for the Verizon Galaxy Note 2 has been around for a bit now, a fully unlocked experience was previously believed near-impossible. Now you too can do custom recoveries and install your own ROMs with the same ease as any other Note 2 owner.

So what’s needed to get the job done? Heading to XDA is a good place to start, as is watching Outler’s XDA TV video. You will also need a special tool apparently, affectionately named “Suck it Verizon Odin Package”.

Where you avoiding Verizon’s version of the Note 2 do to the lack of an unlocked bootloader? Does this news change your mind?

If you thought owning a Mac would make you impervious to malware, think again. A Russian security firm is reporting the first threat of this kind to appear on an Apple machine.

Doctor Web, a Russian security firm, has found a Trojan that mimics the OS X installer on Apple computers in order to obtain phone numbers. The threat is called Trojan.SMSSend.3666 and according to Doctor Web, it is the first such malware to maliciously imitate the installer. Similar threats used to only appear on Windows machines. The Trojan usually gets downloaded through what appears to be legitimate software. 

When the user attempts to open the compromised program, the malware launches a fake installer on OS X machines and introduces a prompt asking the user to enter a phone number to activate the software. The malicious program then sends a code by SMS that the user enters to supposedly finish the activation process. That process charges a subscription fee to the user, regularly debited to the person’s mobile phone. Some of the installers do complete the download of the software it’s pretending to be, but the focus of the attack is the phone number.

Targeting victims by mobile number hasn’t been successful in the past, but the spread of this style of malware into Macs shows that cybercriminals have found ways of making it lucrative. More and more services –  such as social networks like Facebook and Twitter – are connected to phones these days. According to The Next Web, the appearance of the installer malware on OS X before iOS shows how much tougher it is to get malware on Apple’s mobile devices. It seems that the extra scrutiny the company levels against programs in the Apple App Store does pay off.

A pair of Caltech engineers took an ordinary microchip and tweaked it so it can see through solid materials. These X-ray-like chips are inexpensive and can be installed on phones or tablets in the future.

We bet your kids would just love to get a peek at their presents this holiday season. These days, as long as you wrap your gifts well and keep them out of your kids’ reach, you don’t have to worry about young, inquisitive eyes spoiling their own surprise. In the future, however, they might be able to look through a well-wrapped gift and know what it contains with the aid of their phone. The same technology could be used for an array of applications, including security, health, and even gaming.

Ali Hajimiri and Kaushik Sengupta, a duo of electrical engineers at the California Institute of Technology, have developed silicon microchips that radiate high-frequency electromagnetic waves called terahertz (THz) waves. These waves can pass through solid materials and send back detailed images of what lies behind them. Lying between microwaves and far-infrared radiation, they’re also not harmful like ionizing X-rays. Scientists have long been developing technologies that can utilize the power of terahertz waves, but what’s great about this one is that the special chips were made out of inexpensive, ordinary microchips like the ones used on your phones and tablets. Many existing terahertz systems are costly and bulky at the same time. 

Hajimiri and Sengupta believe their technology could be used in many areas, such as by law enforcement to detect explosives and other threats; in the food industry to determine the components of food (such as the fat content of chicken tissue); in the gaming industry for touchless controls; and in medicine for noninvasive cancer diagnosis. ”We are not just talking about a potential,” Hajimiri said. ”We have actually demonstrated that this works. The first time we saw the actual images, it took our breath away.” Of course, just like other emerging technologies, these chips could be abused the moment they become readily available. After all, being able to see through solid material is a creeper’s dream come true. 

(Image credit: Vince at Flickr)

For a short period last night, prospective buyers of Halo 4's new Crimson Map Pack were able to snag the entire DLC offering for free. Now, after the fact, Microsoft and 343 Industries claim that this was part of the plan all along.

After finishing up my work for Digital Trends last night, I decided to unwind by playing a few multiplayer matches in 343 Industries’ recently-released blockbuster shooter Halo 4. Noticing that the game’s first DLC map pack had just appeared on the Xbox Live Marketplace, I thought to myself that the $10 price point it featured was a perfectly reasonable amount of cash to spend on three new multiplayer arenas. Thus, I clicked through to the Xbox Live Marketplace option at the bottom of Halo 4′s main menu, pulled up the Crimson Map Pack listing and instructed my Xbox 360 to download the 500MB-plus addition.

That’s when things got a bit strange. My console responded to my command immediately and started pulling down the data that would eventually make up the Crimson Map Pack. That’s pretty typical, but what’s odd here is that the Xbox Live Marketplace never actually deducted the 800 Microsoft Points (read: $10USD) from my Xbox Live account. Realizing that I needed to explore this anomaly further, I started looking into the issue, but the Internet had surprisingly little to tell me about what was going on.

At the time, the best I could find were a handful of comments on this Joystiq article detailing the issues 343 Industries was having in making the DLC available to owners of the Halo 4 Limited Edition bundle (which is supposed to offer players early access to the game’s DLC offerings). The very first comment on that piece echoes my confusing issue. “For some reason when I clicked Xbox Live Marketplace on the main menu it let me download the Crimson Map Pack for free,” writes Dylan Chatland, seemingly as bewildered by this turn of events as I was.

At this point I realized I was getting nowhere and instead decided to contact Microsoft directly to ask the publisher what exactly was going on. A few hours later we received a reply from Microsoft representatives. “We are aware of the situation. I’m working on getting more details,” they told us.

Roughly 12 hours after our initial email we received a substantial response from Microsoft. It reads as follows:

As an additional reward to those customers that participated in our “14 Day, Buy and Play” program (which ran from Nov. 6 – Nov. 20), we are providing complimentary access to the Crimson Map Pack for a limited time, through Tuesday, December 18 at 9am UTC/GMT.

You’ll notice that this is the first we’ve heard of this promotional effort. Assuming Microsoft or 343 Industries had planned a stealthy release of the Crimson Map Pack specifically for a select group of players, wouldn’t one of the companies have mentioned all of this prior to its debut? The only other alternative we can imagine is that somebody at either of the aforementioned firms made a glaring mistake and in an effort to minimize public damage the companies have decided to simply leave well enough alone. Those who picked up the Crimson Map Pack for free will get to keep their DLC, at least for a limited time.

So does this mean that come December 18 those free Map Packs will no longer function? We asked Microsoft, and have yet to hear back. Further, we also asked the company if this newly-revealed scheme was an effort to cover up an internal error. We’ve yet to receive a response to that inquiry as well. If Microsoft offers us a reply we’ll be sure to bring it to you, but for now we should probably assume that the gratis Crimson Map Pack is a time sensitive offer.

With that in mind, is anyone up for a bit of Infinity Slayer on Harvest? We may not have access to the map for long, so we may as well make good use of it, huh?