It's Monday, Arsians, and that means the Dealmaster is back with deals for you! Topping the list sent over by our partners at

Microsoft isn't waiting until E3 to pull back the curtain on its follow-up to the Xbox 360; the company has scheduled a presentation for select press at its Redmond campus mere weeks before the big industry confab. The fun starts at 10am Pacific on Tuesday, May 21 ( use this tool to see when the event starts in your neck of the woods).

"Xbox: A New Generation Revealed," will be Microsoft's first console unveiling in over eight years , and the company has to be planning a big splash in answer to Sony's February PS4 event . Expect details on everything from the new system's hardware power and controller to its big launch titles and even an official name that's less unwieldy than "next Xbox." Don't expect details on a price point or precise launch date to come until later in the year, though stranger things have happened.

We'll update

If you think the private messages you send over Skype are protected by end-to-end encryption, think again. The Microsoft-owned service regularly scans message contents for signs of fraud, and company managers may log the results indefinitely, Ars has confirmed. And this can only happen if Microsoft can convert the messages into human-readable form at will.

With the help of independent privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani , Ars used Skype to send four Web links that were created solely for purposes of this article. Two of them were never clicked on, but the other two—one beginning in HTTP link and the other HTTPS—were accessed, by a machine at 65.52.100.214, an IP address belonging to Microsoft . For those interested in the technical details, the log line looked like this:

'65.52.100.214 - - [16/May/2013 11:30:10] "HEAD /index.html?test_never_clicked HTTP/1.1" 200 -' 

The results—which were similar but not identical to those reported last