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After last year’s revelations about U.S. Internet surveillance raised interest in privacy tools, Google and Yahoo both announced they were working on software to let people who use their e-mail services easily exchange encrypted messages. Now a prototype browser extension called ShadowCrypt, made by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland, goes even further. It makes it easy to send and receive encrypted text on Twitter, Facebook, or any other website.

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The Apple iPhone 6 Plus is a significantly larger take on the traditional iPhone experience. But it looks and feels great: it's thinner than the iPhone 5S that preceded it, and sports revamped hardware.

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The tracking cookie appears to be part of Verizon’s Precision Market Insights program, which started way back in 2012. AT&T has been testing a similar supercookie, but so far it seems only Verizon has rolled it out network-wide. The tracking cookie, as you can probably guess, allows Verizon to track almost everything that you do on the internet, and then sell that behavioral data to advertisers. While it’s utterly heinous that you can’t opt out, it gets worse: Verizon’s implementation of the supercookie is so sloppy that any third party can also use the cookie to track your behavior. Clearly, privacy is something that only happens on other carriers.

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Sure, you’ve been able to tap and swipe with Windows before, but some of the more advanced gestures we’ve seen in Mac OS X are now making their way into Microsoft’s extremely popular operating system. It’s definitely borrowing heavily from Apple, but that shouldn’t matter for end users. This is a big jump forward in Windows usability on trackpads, so it’s worth stealing a little bit of “magic” from Apple.

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Meanwhile, in a rare interview with Google’s search chief Amit Singhal, he says that Google search will one day be the “perfect personal assistant giving you benefit of all technical knowledge, enhancing your thought processes.” Clearly, Google is now painting its future with very broad strokes — but what image might resolve from those marks, I don’t think anybody knows.

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