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Activists File Facebook Class Action Suit in Austria

An Austrian law graduate spearheading a class action case against Facebook for alleged privacy breaches officially filed the suit in a Vienna court on Thursday.

In a closely-watched case, Max Schrems and 25,000 other users are suing the social media giant for various rights violations, ranging from the "illegal" tracking of their data under EU law to Facebook's involvement in the PRISM surveillance program of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

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YouTube to Give Viewers Ad-free Option for Monthly Fee

YouTube will soon give viewers the option of paying a monthly fee to skip ads.

On Wednesday, the online video service sent a letter to its most-popular content creators asking them to sign off on new contract terms to allow for the change.

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Survey: Smartphones Boost U.S. Teens' Connections

It's not just your imagination: most American teenagers are online or on their smartphones every day, and many are almost continually connected. 

A Pew Research Center survey released Thursday found that 92 percent of US teens go online daily.

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Silicon Valley Mulls Invasion of 'Unicorns'

When social media software firm Sprinklr unveiled its latest funding last month, it vaulted into the club of "unicorns," or tech startups worth at least $1 billion.

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U.S. Aerospace Command Moving Comms Gear Back to Bunker

The U.S. military command that scans North America's skies for enemy missiles and aircraft plans to move its communications gear to a Cold War-era mountain bunker, officers said Tuesday.

The shift to the Cheyenne Mountain base in Colorado is designed to safeguard the command's sensitive sensors and servers from a potential electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, military officers said.

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College Tie-ins Allow more to Join Michigan Robotics Craze

An increasing number of students from Michigan's most financially strapped urban school districts, including Detroit and Flint, are joining robotics teams because local universities are making space and materials available at no charge.

The University of Michigan started the trend with its Michigan Engineering Zone. The 5,200-square-foot facility in Detroit, filled with two computer labs, a machine shop, robot testing area and collaborative workstations, hosts 18 teams from city schools. Many of them wouldn't be able to participate in the FIRST robotics contest otherwise.

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Samsung Shows Signs of Emerging from Earnings Slump

Samsung's quarterly operating earnings fell 31 percent from a year earlier but the drop wasn't as big as expected in a sign the smartphone and computer chip giant may be emerging from its profit slump.

The company on Tuesday estimated its January-March operating profit at 5.9 trillion won ($5.4 billion), exceeding the average 5.5 trillion won forecast in a FactSet survey of analysts.

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Consumer Groups Say YouTube Kids App is Deceiving

The new YouTube Kids mobile app targets young children with unfair and deceptive advertising and should be investigated, a group of consumer advocates told the Federal Trade Commission in a letter Tuesday.

Google introduced the app in February as a "safer" place for kids to explore videos because it was restricted to "family-focused content."

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Computer Sharing of Personality in Sight

The world has only touched the surface of technological progress and computers may soon be able to transmit the complexities of human personalities, a prominent inventor says.

Sebastian Thrun, who founded the Google X laboratory where the Internet search giant has developed Google Glass and driverless cars, said it was often difficult to grasp concepts before they come to fruition.

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Judge Orders Facebook and Zuckerberg to Turn over Documents

Facebook and its founder must release documents and electronic correspondence to a defense lawyer whose client has fled from criminal charges that he falsely claimed a majority ownership in the social media giant, a federal judge said.

U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick on Friday ordered Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg to relinquish documents by Monday that were requested by Paul Ceglia's lawyer, Robert Ross Fogg.

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