NSA Spies on International Payments
The United States' NSA intelligence agency is interested in international payments processed by companies including Visa, SPIEGEL has learned. It has even set up its own financial database to track m...
Sprint preps ‘One Up,’ its own early upgrade program
Sprint One Up allows customers to pay for their devices in monthly installments and upgrade after one year, CNET has learned. — Better late than never, Sprint is finally getting into the early upgra...
Netflix Uses Pirate Sites to Determine What Shows to Buy
Video streaming giant Netflix sees itself as one of the most prominent competitors to the many pirate sites that offer video content without owners' permission. — However, these pirate sites also of...
Rdio to announce ad-supported free tier in partnership with radio operator Cumulus
Online Music Service Rdio in Deal With Cumulus — As radio broadcasters go digital and online music services try to stand out in a crowded market, both are finding ways to scratch each other's backs.
The Virtues of Twitter's Confidential I.P.O. Filing
When Twitter announced yesterday afternoon (via tweet, naturally) that it was planning to file an I.P.O., the company said it had started the process by “confidentially” submitting an S-1 prospectus t...
Why the PhoneBloks phone will never happen
It's a physics issue. Signals in modern devices are extremely high speed; the easiest and cheapest way to combat this is to bring components closer together. For example, the wireless radios, RAM, a...
Silicon Valley Luminaries Got Grilled On The NSA At Disrupt, Here's How They Responded
On Monday, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington wrote that he would press the CEOs, VCs, and other Silicon Valley leaders who he was interviewing at TechCrunch Disrupt about the NSA scandal.
Google Translate Has Ambitious Goals for Machine Translation
Can the language barrier be breached? Google certainly thinks so: Under the leadership of a computer scientist from Germany, the company is making progress toward a universal translation tool. But c...
AT&T Threatens Persistent Pirates With Account Termination
After years of negotiating and planning the long-awaited U.S. “six-strikes” system finally went live in February. — The Copyright Alert System's main goal is to educate the public. That is, informi...