The National Security Agency programs that collect huge volumes of Internet data within the United States pass are constitutional and employ "reasonable" safeguards designed to protect the rights of Americans, an independent privacy and civil liberties board has found.

In a report released Tuesday night, the bipartisan, five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, appointed by President Barack Obama, largely endorsed a set of NSA surveillance programs that have provoked worldwide controversy since they were disclosed last year by former NSA systems administrator Edward Snowden.

Federal regulators are urging consumers to go through their phone bills line by line after they accused T-Mobile U.S. of wrongly charging customers for premium services, like horoscope texts and quirky ringtones, the customers never authorized.

The Federal Trade Commission announced Tuesday that it is suing T-Mobile in a federal court in Seattle with the goal of making sure every unfairly charged customer sees a full refund. The lawsuit, the first of its kind against a mobile provider, is the result of months of stalled negotiations with T-Mobile, which says it is already offering refunds.

Microsoft on Tuesday said it is scrambling Outlook email messages in transit to thwart spying by governments or others.

Toughened encryption at Outlook and Microsoft OneDrive online "cloud" data storage service came less than a month after the technology titan got low marks in a Google ranking of such defenses against online snooping.

Your favorite team is playing for the title, and you are in the middle of the field.

Google Glass is slowly becoming more common in sports as teams and broadcasters try to bring fans closer to the action. The American football team Philadelphia Eagles will test the Internet-connected eyewear for in-game use, and a company with a key application for the technology says it has secured a new round of financing that will help roll out its Glass program to sports, entertainment and other fields.

Google on Monday said it is shutting down Orkut, its "first foray into social networking," to focus on YouTube, Blogger, and Google+ services that have proven more popular.

The California technology titan will pull the plug on 10-year-old Orkut at the end of September.

Twitter announced Monday that it has cut a deal to buy mobile ad firm Tap Commerce to bolster money-making tools at the popular one-to-many messaging service.

San Francisco-based Twitter did not disclose how much it paid for Tap Commerce, which is located in New York City, but technology news website Recode.net reported the deal to be valued around $100 million.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt visited Cuba this week along with three other top executives to promote "a free Internet," Cuban independent online newspaper "14yMedio" reported Sunday.

The four executives "met with officials," spoke "with youth at polytechnical schools" and, on Saturday, visited the University of Computer Sciences in western Havana, wrote the newspaper, run by dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez.

Facebook secretly manipulated the feelings of 700,000 users to understand "emotional contagion" in a study that prompted anger and forced the social network giant on the defensive.

For one week in 2012, Facebook tampered with the algorithm used to place posts into users' news feeds to study how this affected their mood, all without their explicit consent or knowledge.

General Motors Friday announced three more safety recalls covering nearly 475,000 vehicles, the biggest of which involves a software problem in some leading sport utility vehicles and pickup models.

GM will recall more than 450,000 models of the 2014-2015 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra, among others, in which control module software in the four-wheel drive system could automatically switch to neutral without driver input.

The Philippines has passed a law that requires mobile phone companies to send early warnings to millions of people in the path of deadly typhoons, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes in an effort to reduce high number of fatalities that occur almost every year.

The measure was in response to one of the deadliest typhoons ever to make landfall — Typhoon Haiyan, which killed over 6,300 people and displaced 4 million in the central Philippines last year.