Google has filed a motion to end the gag order on the secret FISA court requests that it gets from the government as a part of the National Security Agencies surveillance, which could work considering how recent efforts to reveal the secrets of the secret court have gone.
Props to Joanna Rohrback, who managed to turn her memeness into Internet fame in less than a month — now with an actual video for a pop song, which, apparently, is about Taylor Swift.
"Maker of 'Candy Crush Saga' Plans IPO," reports the Wall Street Journal today, which very possibly makes zero sense to you. What's Candy Crush? you might ask. How does something with a silly name like that get big enough for a public offering? And did you say Zynga? Because that doesn't sound good. The Atlantic Wire is here to answer all those questions and more.
With a summer full of beach reading (hopefully) ahead of us, we're faced with the technological dilemma of the season: How venture outside without ruining our fragile, not-amenable-to-the-elements e-reading gadgets. So what to do? The Atlantic Wire spoke with the Internet's tech experts and gadget nerds for their advice on e-reading outside like a pro.
Of the nine companies supposedly working with the government on PRISM, four and a half — Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft (which may or may not include Skype), Apple, and Google (sort of) — have disclosed the number of government requests they get including the secret FISA court ones, giving us an idea of which tech company the government loves most.
Everybody wins when NASA does something good, and the news that the program selected its highest percentage, ever, of female astronauts for its new class is no exception.
When looking for a way to digital detox most of us — besides the likes of Woody Allen — aren't going to pay people to do our Internetting for us.
Want to see what Digg’s RSS reader will look like when it comes in beta form next week? The company released a few more details and photos of the news reader for desktop and mobile.
A week after Apple's not-so-successful release of its new iPhone operating system, today we get an in-depth look at the strict guidelines that dictate Google's design team, showing exactly why the Google app icons all have a similar look and Apple's most certainly do not.
With a mysterious Facebook product launch coming up on Thursday, the rumormongers think they've landed on yet another possibility: a video competitor for Twitter's Vine, made by none other than Instagram itself. You know, even though the rumormongers believed something else entirely just a few hours earlier.
In its second official statement on the matter, Apple has clarified its relationship with the U.S. government claiming that at least FaceTime and iMessages are safe from the National Security Agency's prying eyes, due to super-encryption.
How do massive electromagnets move? Incredibly slowly, if the $3 million plan to get one of them from New York to Chicago can tell us anything.
The tension between Sergio Garcia and Tiger Woods reached a rocky impasse at the start of this weekend's U.S. Open when the two shook hands before teeing off. But the spectators at Merion are letting Garcia know they haven't forgotten his racially questionable joke.
There's been a lot of mystery surrounding how, exactly, the National Security Agency's top secret PRISM program actually works. And now, thanks to a new report from the Associated Press, we have the biggest and broadest understanding of how our government is spying on foreign operatives, and on Americans, and really the entire Internet.
Facebook became the first tech company implicated in the PRISM scandal to release a complete view of data requests received from U.S. authorities — secret PRISM requests and all — but Google and Twitter were quick to voice their displeasure with Facebook's apparent privacy triumph.
The linguistic snobs over at the Oxford English Dictionary have accepted "tweet" — as in "to Twitter" — into its exclusive language club because "it seems to be catching on" as a verb in its own right, which got us thinking: how did it get itself lower-case t status?
Despite all this iOS 7 negativity sounding a lot like the initial — eventually meaningless — iPhone 5 nitpicking, Apple might be reconsidering some of its questionable design choices.
Following a week of incredibly bad press some sources have leaked some very dubious "talks" between the National Security Administration and Facebook about allowing more transparency and disclosure with government data requests.
In a move as fiendishly clever as it is galling, Microsoft tells the U.S. government about bugs in its notoriously buggy software before it fixes them so that intelligence agencies can use the vulnerabilities for the purposes of cyberspying. And that's just one of the new revelations that the tech world is in bed espionage agencies.
Yahoo, one of the companies named as part of the NSA's PRISM data collection program, didn't go quietly, according to a New York Times scoop posted late Thursday
Apple, king of gadget design, teased its fans with a new round Mac Pro that — uh oh! — some think looks like a garbage can.
Nobody, not even on the Internet, likes to be screamed at, which has led to the slow disappearance of an Internet lingo tradition: the ALL CAPS shouty-phrase.
The day's most popular Apple rumor is that, unnamed sources say, the company is considering two very big screen phones, one of which will get into phablet territory at 5.7 inches, which sounds like something Apple has said it would never do.
Iran may have targeted tens of thousands of Iranians with a phishing scheme in the weeks leading up to Friday's elections, according to an announcement by Google on Wednesday.
Poor Jony Ive. The Apple senior vice president of design and supposed mastermind behind the latest update to the iPhone operating system has gotten all the blame for a flat new iOS 7 that nobody likes, and it might not be entirely his fault.
The rumored Facebook-approved hashtag has arrived, and instead of complaining about how Facebook will bring Twitter's much loathed, overused punctuation to a News Feed near you, it's about time we all embraced the organizational simplicity and enhanced search options now sticking to your wall. Because Facebook is making the hashtag useful again.
At the end of Jenna Sauers' Village Voice cover story on Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, Questlove once again basically confirms that The Roots will be following Jimmy Fallon to The Tonight Show in early 2014, by explaining that his next task is writing a theme song for the show.
The man who invented the emoticon does not like what you kids have done to his sideways smiley face with all of the hip emoji and sticker trends of the social media, thank you very much.
Google has now clarified exactly the kind of access the National Security Agency has to its servers. But how does it really work, will this revelation make anyone feel better about the very privacy and transparency Google is pushing for? We explain.
Ashton Williams has clarified that she did not take offense, which does not change the fact that Microsoft prominently featured an "off the cuff" rape reference at the company's biggest presentation for one of its biggest products ever, the Xbox One. And it doesn't appear to be changing the gender roles in the gaming industry either.
In a letter to to the attorney general and the FBI director, the head lawyer for the world's leading information crawler has asked the U.S. government for permission to publish the number of top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests it receives from the nation's spy agencies and beyond each year. It represented a shot across the bow from Silicon Valley, or at least an attempt to soften the blow of a startling week of NSA leaks. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg and his top lawyer are speaking out, too, and Microsoft followed suit.
The battle for the hottest mapping startup on the plane is finally over, and Google — the undisputed king of 21-century maps — has officially prevailed, purchasing the company for a reported $1.03 billion, apparently because the Tel Aviv-based Waze didn't want to relocate all the way to the belly of the Googleplex.
After years of complaints about Apple's cheesy, outdated, and decidedly "skeuomorphic" iPhone software look, the company and its geek design god Jony Ive have unveiled iOS 7 and, well, nobody in the design-geek set really likes it.
Now that we know all the specs about Microsoft and Sony's new video-game-and-lots-of-other-stuff consoles, it's time to settle this war before it gets any uglier: Which system is better when they're put side-by-side in an early test of living-room supremacy? Let's break it down.
Perhaps more than any segment of the technology industry, gamer culture has had its fair share of sexism problems, so it's not that surprising that a Microsoft presenter slipped an apparent rape reference into a Monday presentation at the biggest video-game conference of the year.
If you watched closely at Tim Cook's keynote today, amidst all the other new goodies to come out of the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, there was an easter egg of sorts: Apple has slipped in a new FaceTime Audio feature to its beefed-up iOS 7, and it brings iPhone owners one step closer to — well, to not really ever needing a phone plan.
Forget the guilt of having built the technology that allows the government to spy on its citizens' private lives more than ever before — the biggest concern out of Silicon Valley about the NSA mess is that all this bad press could be bad news for the bottom line, so the entrepreneurs are all ganging up on Washington.
If all those rumormongers have it right, this year's Worldwide Developers Conference will be one big game of catch-up for Apple, a technology giant that's not exactly used to coming from behind. No matter which of the expectations are fulfilled, Apple will no doubt align with its encroaching competition. Probably like this.
After a series of stunning reports from the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald on the NSA's data collection programs, the paper will no doubt remain a central figure in the story of Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked the PRISM slides in the first place. But, according to one of the reporters by-lined on the Washington Post's PRISM story, the exclusive was theirs to lose.
Popular mapping-app Waze has been a hot commodity in the tech world recently, fetching offers from Facebook and Apple along the $1 billion range. But it appears Google won the bidding war, for a cool $1.3 billion, according to a report from Israeli media.
New reports released Saturday morning reveal Facebook and Google were telling something resembling the truth when they denied the NSA has "direct access" to their servers, and that the government doesn't, in fact, have direct access to these massive personal information treasures storing most of our modern day-to-day communications.
Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg went on record giving nearly the exact same denials of involvement with the NSA — one of the many questionable aspects of their remarks.
The banners have started going up in preparation for Monday's World Wide Developer's Conference, meaning it's time to decipher what they mean with regards to goodies Apple will announce at the show.
It's Tony time on Sunday, meaning the theater community will gather to honor a bunch of shows that most of America probably didn't see. Here's who we think is going to win.
On a Friday full of tech-land denials and government distancing and no real answers about how the NRA's sweeping spy program actually works, Palanatir — the "Mysterious Silicon Valley Company Helping the NSA Spy on Americans" — now insists that its own "Prism" system for database mining has nothing to do with the NSA's "PRISM" data-mining program, but that's not going to calm many privacy fears, either.
Friday's leak of 13 NSA documents, which Anonymous claims "prove that the NSA is spying on you," result in mostly intelligible government gibberish — goofy graphics included — but one of the most fascinating documents led us to a whistleblower site called Cryptome, which suggests the PRISM program has been around since at least 2006, and maybe as early as 2003.
As the NSA surveillance story goes from bad to worse to Philip K. Dick, some of the Silicon Valley companies implicated in the so-called "PRISM" program are denying that they've ever heard of it.
Chinese hackers backed by the People’s Republic of China accessed internal data from both the McCain and Obama campaigns in the lead-up to the 2008 elections, according to a report from NBC News.
If you thought the National Security Agency's collection of Verizon phone-call data was bad, wait until you hear about PRISM, the seven-year-old, previously undisclosed classified government program that works with nine very major U.S. Internet companies to secretly scrape your online life and has become "the most prolific contributor" to President Obama's daily intelligence report and is "increasingly" important to the NSA.
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