This week, a million Beautiful People get hacked, the FCC & cable boxes, racist apps & services?, how driverless trucks will change the economy, Tron comes to VR gaming … and much more this week on The Drill Down podcast.

This week, we celebrate all that is Star Wars, TIDAL is a wash-out, Netflix is bigger than CBS, Google becomes a mobile carrier, and is Nokia coming back from the dead? …and much much more.

This week, some retailers ban Apple Pay in favor of an upcoming service that’s already been hacked, YouTube to offer ad-free subscriptions?, AT&T misled millions and the feds are taking them to court, Fitbit joins the smartwatch race, Marvel plans out its next five years of superhero movies, and much more.

This week, The Drill Down crew looks back at the year in tech and the web for the year 2013. We’ll discuss our favorite tech events of the past year, and what we can expect in 2014.

Before that, however, we discuss a recent discovery that the NSA sought to spy on gamers, eight top tech companies ban together to reform surveillance laws, and is Apple‘s iBeacon just a marketing gimmick or are there bigger plans in store?

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This week, the NSA hacks El Presidente, Windows 8.1 launches (and unlaunches), Nokia’s new Lumia and Apple’s Fall cornucopia of product offerings. All this and more…

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This week, Edward Snowden strikes again, this time with the U.S. spy “Black Budget,” a new Kindle, Samsung’s watch, Microsoft buys Nokia, Tosin’s Pax Prime experience, and more…

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On this week’s show, Apple announces the (presumably) iPhone 5 launch event, Google & Apple CEOs negotiate behind closed doors, HBO tests streaming-only service overseas, Amazon prepares to refresh the Kindle line, AntiSec leaks Apple iPhone device IDs allegedly obtained from stolen FBI hard drives. Nokia announces the Lumia 920, and Motorola announces the RAZR HD.

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This week The Drill Down team takes a look at the battle for your online distributed data, with new features on cloud storage services from Microsoft, Dropbox, and Google. Then, it’s sci-fi billionaires in space!!! as Google’s Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and director James Cameron launch into a new venture to mine asteroids.

But first, the headlines… Nokia‘s down 30% with a $1.7 BN loss, Anonymous launches a social music service, Facebook pays Microsoft $550 M for former AOL patents, Adobe announces Creative Suite 6 (and subscription-based licenses), and Facebook announces its staggering Q1 financials, including details on its Instagram purchase.

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This week, The Drill Down team discusses Facebook’s one billion dollar purchase of mobile phone startup Instagram, and whether or not that portends another tech bubble; plus, Is the age of cheap, subsidized cellphones over? But first let’s look at this week’s tech headlines…

Commodore founder Jack Tramiel dies, Apple patches a trojan affecting 600K Macs, US DOJ sues Apple & e-book publishers for price fixing, the FCC‘s plan to track your lost cellphone, Microsoft pays $1 BN for AOL patents, Nokia launches the Lumia 900, Netflix forms a PAC, and Google Plus gets a makeover.

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This week, The Drill Down team (including occasional co-host TechMeme editor Lidija Davis) talk about employers asking prospective new hires for their Facebook (and other social) passwords and Facebook’s reaction to that. Also, we look at the issues and reactions that have emerged in the two weeks since the launch of Apple’s new iPad.

But first, this week’s headlines… Apple to pay dividends, Kevin Rose to work for Google, Zynga buys OMGPOP, Facebook buys 750 patents from IBM, Nokia‘s Lumia 900 comes to AT&T, Obvtuse vs Svbtle, and Google shows you what you’ve been doing…on Google.

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