Warner Music Group and Universal Music are both excited about Apple's planned streaming service, but Sony Music is apparently hung up on how much it gets paid for songs that are skipped. Bryan Chaffin is mystified by this kind of myopia and thinks that Sony needs to pull its corporate head out of its corporate behind.

Apple CEO Tim Cook will be using his time in a Congressional hearing to propose an overhaul to the U.S. corporate tax system. News that Mr. Cook would appear in the hearing broke early Thursday morning, but the leader of the world's richest corporation told The Washington Post that he will propose changes that make it easier for U.S. companies to bring profits back to the U.S. rather than holding them offshore.

Google announced on Wednesday that it would be offering customers a version of Samsung's new Galaxy S4 (GS4) that has been stripped of Samsung's layered-on-top interface and other added software. At Google I/O 2013, the company's annual developer conference, Google said that it was "Google's take on Android"*, and that it would sell the device for US$649 direct to consumers.

Shocked, we say. Shocked. We are utterly shocked*. Sales of the HTC First—the so-called "Facebook Phone—have reportedly been so bad that AT&T is ready to kill it. The device was announced on April 4th, but according to BGR, AT&T has sold just 15,000 units and is ready to pull the plug.

Samsung announced on Monday that it has tested a technology the company is calling "5G" that can transmit data at up to 1Gbps, a speed that is up to ten times faster than today's LTE networks. The company said that it could weaponize commercialize the technology by 2020.

Personal assessments of what technology to adopt and what to ignore is what we do these days. Developers develop, technical columnists experiment and report, and individuals decide yea or nay. However, basing those decisions on old-fashioned or emotional preconceptions in increasingly unproductive. John Martellaro roughs up the technical hobgoblins and sizes up iOS 7.

China is digging deep in its efforts to use Apple as a political and economic pawn, demonstrating that merely apologizing for mistakes and then correcting them won't keep the company out of the Chinese government's crosshairs. Bryan Chaffin discusses the issues.

New Zealand's parliament is considering a bill that rethinks software patents. The bill, while not explicitly banning software patents per se, instead declares software alone as not eligible for patent protection because there is no "inventive step" involved. Bryan Chaffin looks at the implications.

Apple and Samsung combined to claim 100 percent of hardware profits in the smartphone industry, according to a new report from Cannacord Genuity. While Apple still claimed most of those profits, Samsung has reached up to take more profits home to Korea.

A German court has invalidated eight clauses in Apple's user privacy agreement, highlighting the importance of privacy in that country. While Apple goes further than most tech ompanies to protect our data, the German ruling shows there is even more room for improvement.