The PR boffins at LG decided it would be a good idea to release 100 helium-filled balloons, each carrying a voucher entitling the recipient to claim their 950,000 won ($852.54) smartphone. It then took to social media to promote the event, inviting people to witness the balloons' release and encouraging them to grab one of the vouchers.

People aren’t stupid. They figured out that the only way to get the voucher was to burst the balloons, and they showed up equipped to do so with BB guns, knives on sticks, and other tools.

The latest NSA plan to stop the next Ed Snowden is to get rid of 90% of their sysadmins and automating many of their jobs.

Considering that sophisticated techies aren't very interested in working for the NSA these days, perhaps it all works out for them.

Also, this more or less confirms what was fairly obvious (due to the NSA leaks by Snowden) that sysadmins have near universal access in the NSA's system.

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

"Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function," a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD's involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is using mobile malware to infect, and control, suspects' Android handsets, allowing it to record nearby sounds and copy data without physical access to the devices.

The usual techniques of not opening unknown attachments or unsigned downloads should protect you against the FBI, just as it would against any spear-phishing attempt.

According to Snowden's files on X-Keyscore, NSA employees can, with just a few clicks, obtain everything from phone numbers to e-mail addresses. The agency also can see e-mail content, full Internet activity, browser history, and an IP address. According to the files and Snowden, the NSA can essentially see everything a person is doing on the Internet without the need for a warrant.

The U.S. government, meanwhile, has dealt with the fallout from his leaks and has been criticized by foreign governments for its allegedly more-extensive-than-previously-believed intelligence programs. If the latest reports are true, the NSA could again come under fire from those critics.

ASCAP has been offering iHeartRadio and other terrestrial stations that also do streaming cheaper licenses for their streaming than it offers to Pandora. Pandora has argued that this violates the antitrust agreement that the DOJ made ASCAP agree to, after it was discovered that ASCAP was engaged in a variety of anti-competitive practices to restrict the market.

ASCAP clearly has discriminatory pricing practices against online-only streaming companies -- and is embarrassed by Pandora making this point very clearly by purchasing this tiny radio station.

The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.

But ask the NSA as part of a freedom of information request to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees' e-mail? The agency says it doesn't have the technology.

"It's just baffling," says Mark Caramanica of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "This is an agency that's charged with monitoring millions of communications globally, and they can't even track their own internal communications in response to a FOIA request."

Streaming media services are the ultimate form of copy protection—you never actually control the media files, which are encrypted before delivery, and your ability to access the content can be revoked if you disagree with updated terms of service; you’re also subject to arbitrary changes in subscription prices.

Since streaming services host the multimedia content and send it to you upon each request for playback, they can always deny the request. Netflix streaming content sometimes features impending expiration dates. In April, Netflix decided to limit access to two concurrent streams per subscriber, putting an end to years of informal password sharing between roommates, acquaintances, and family members.

France's foreign intelligence service intercepts computer and telephone data on a vast scale, like the controversial US Prism programme, according to the French daily Le Monde.

The DGSE allegedly analyses the "metadata" - not the contents of e-mails and other communications, but the data revealing who is speaking to whom, when and where.

The French government has sharply criticised the US spying, which allegedly included eavesdropping on official EU communications.

Green party politician Malte Spitz sued to have German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom hand over six months of his phone data that he then made available to ZEIT ONLINE. We combined this geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet.