It turns out that the U.S.’ NSA is not the only intelligence agency conducting privacy-invading surveillance on average citizens. The UK’s GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) has been quietly collecting data – including revealing screenshots of breasts and other body parts – from Yahoo webcam chats – under an effort called Project Optic Nerve.

Reports are saying that WhatsApp users are leaving WhatsApp and signing up with an alternative to WhatsApp at an astonishing rate since the announcement that Facebook is aquiring WhatsApp for $19billion. While the WhatsApp outage that happened just a few days after the announcement hasn’t helped, most industry sources say that the international userbase is jumping ship primarily over privacy concerns, with users trusting neither the United States in general, nor Facebook in particular, to protect their privacy.

In a scathing indictment against the Democratic (hah!) People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), also known as North Korea, the UN’s Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has levelled charges amounting to crimes against humanity. The United Nations commission found that “The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”

Saying that perhaps she should have shown “better judgement”, Russian Olympian and official Irina Rodnina (@IRodnina) downplayed the response to her racist Obama tweet – a picture of the Obamas, with someone offering President Obama a banana in the foreground.

The newest reveal about the NSA’s surveillance activities is the existance of the NSA Co-Traveler program, through which the NSA is tracking the location and movements of the majority of cell phones on the planet, relationship-mapping every cell phone with every other cell phone.

There has been a lot in the news lately about Bitcoins (known in the trade as “BTC”) and Bitcoin Mining, but to the average person it’s still very confusing. What are Bitcoins? How does Bitcoin Mining work? What is the Silk Road, which is often mentioned in the same breath as Bitcoins? And why is Congress holding hearings on Bitcoins? Here are the plain English explanations for all of these.

A new model for bringing schools to poorer and third-world countries for as little as $5 per student (per month) is based on standardized lessons and lesson plans being delivered on hand-held tablets and smartphones, communicating on a local cellular network. Bridge International Academies is one such organization, with more than 200 Bridge school in a box locations in Kenya alone, and more planned.

Ever since the news of the Google Barge – or rather the Google Barges, as there are at least two of them, and some reports say that there are as many as four – broke a short while ago, people have been speculating what the Google Barges are for. Are they to be floating data centers? Storage? High flying (or rather floating) entertainment centers?

For a few brief, shining hours, countless Iranian citizens had unfettered access to Facebook and Twitter. Due to what Iranian authorities are calling a “technical glitch”, the ordinarily locked down Internet – which some call the Iranian “filternet” – had Facebook and Twitter shaped holes punched in it.

Experts think that it is entirely possible that the Russians and the Chinese have already accessed the most confidential information that Edward Snowden has on his laptops.

The Vatican has announced that Catholics can receive indulgences in exchange for following Pope Francis on Twitter.

Russia is using the situation with Edward Snowden, the NSA and PRISM leaker, to push an agenda that would see the United Nations taking over primary control of the Internet, from the United States.

Another person, this time Reece Elliot from England, has found themselves in jail over things they have said, and specifically threats they have made, on Facebook.

Just hours before his alleged disappearance from a Hong Kong hotel, Edward Snowden, an ex-CIA employee and NSA contractor working through Booz Allen Hamilton, outed himself as the whistleblower in the NSA PRISM scandal. In the 12-minute video interview posted on YouTube, Ed Snowden explained his reason for releasing the documents that revealed the PRISM program. Here is the transcript of that interview.

Edward Snowden has come forward as the whistleblower in the NSA and PRISM scandal in which it has been discovered that through the PRISM program, the NSA and other agencies have had access to user data at such major Internet companies as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Hotmail and Apple. In the 12+ minute interview, Edward Snowden explains why he did it, and admits that by outing himself, he puts himself in danger from agencies such as the CIA and the NSA itself.