When you think of special effects, you think of huge blockbuster movies like Marvel’s superhero lineup, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, and J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek and the Star Wars franchise he’s now working on, just to name a few. One movie you wouldn’t think of, however, is Martin Scorsese‘s multi-Oscar-nominated The Wolf of Wall Street.

But the truth is—for better or for worse—we live in a digital world, and filmmaking is constantly evolving. So, naturally, it only makes sense that any and all movies that can afford to use some of the insane digital effects tricks we can pull off these days will do just that, including the big awards contenders. It’s actually a little scary how much effects wizards can manipulate these days.

Click on over to the other side to check out an effects reel for The Wolf of Wall Street to see just how fake some of the scenes that appeared perfectly real (in a physical sense) actually were.

This week, the NSA uses radio waves to spy on offline PCs, credit-card hacking comes to luxury retail, Google buys into home automation, and is Net Neutrality on the chopping block?

We ring in the New Year with our first new show of 2014! This week we discuss a new Pebble watch, cloud gaming on Sony PlayStation, T-Mobile wants to pay you to switch, Facebook is dead to teens, are digital music downloads already obsolete?…the legacy of the Snowden NSA leaks, and a cube that balances on its edge.

On this week’s show: Google previously bought seven robotics companies, and this week it buys the Big Dog (literally), Sprint guns for T-Mobile, Instagram wants a piece of Snapchat‘s action, Twitter changes blocking–then changes their mind, are the NSA‘s actions unconstitutional?

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This week, The Drill Down crew looks back at the year in tech and the web for the year 2013. We’ll discuss our favorite tech events of the past year, and what we can expect in 2014.

Before that, however, we discuss a recent discovery that the NSA sought to spy on gamers, eight top tech companies ban together to reform surveillance laws, and is Apple‘s iBeacon just a marketing gimmick or are there bigger plans in store?