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Admiral Michael Rogers, the relatively new head of the National Security Agency, has been on the job for about three months, and he’s been exceedingly diplomatic and measured.

n addition to serving as the face of public relations for the Defense Department's "silent service," Admiral Rogers has taken on two formal roles that come bundled with the NSA director position: head of the Central Security Service, another arm of the US’ 17-tentacled intelligence apparatus, and commander of US Cyber Command, the hub of the military’s cyber efforts. That means one man is in charge of the NSA’s domestic and foreign surveillance, along with defending US government networks, coordinating cyberattacks against enemies, and supervising what is essentially the security IT department for the rest of the Defense Department. So, who is he?

The broadcast industry can breathe again: Aereo -- the startup that streamed broadcast TV over the Internet for cheap -- is dead. Or at least, the incarnation of Aereo that wasn’t paying copyright fees is dead, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling. So what happens now?

A decision in favor of Aereo would have changed things quite a bit for the television industry, but the ruling means back to business as usual. While some have raised fears that the opinion will impact cloud computing services, the court intended for the ruling to apply narrowly to Aereo. "It just means you can expect more of the same," says Michael Greeson, president of The Diffusion Group, a research firm focused on the future of TV. "The broadcasters won the case. There were no caveats, except for that this is a limited case. It would be untenable to extend this decision beyond its limited scope."

Reacting to the news, Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia said that "our work is not done," and that it will "continue to fight for our consumers." Realistically, though, the company is unlikely to survive. "Aereo will go out of business immediately," Greeson says. The fees Aereo is now required to pay broadcasters, which can range from a few cents to a few dollars for every channel, for every subscriber, every month, will make it impossible to continue charging only $8 to $12 a month.

For consumers, the ruling means no change in the high prices from cable companies and limited options for watching TV online or on mobile devices. Cable companies have started to offer streaming online options and mobile apps like Time Warner’s TWC TV app and Comcast’s Xfinity streaming service, but those offerings are expensive, slow to roll out, and tend to be poorly designed.

A controversial ruling from a European court recently granted people the so-called "right to be forgotten," forcing Google to remove some search links upon request.

If you'd like a medium for sending such a request, Forget.me will now step in, spiriting away everything about you.

The site, a European privacy advocacy project, gives requesters a step-by-step procedure for lodging a request with Google, no knowledge on the finer points of law required. Log in, choose your country, perform a search for yourself, select the offending link, decide on which category your request falls under, and ship it all off to Google. While you wait, Forget.me will track the link's status, informing you when the information has left the physical plane.

Google has quietly launched its own Internet domain registration service. And like many Google projects, Google Domains is starting off in beta; you'll need an invite to get in and purchase your own URL.

But the company's latest effort could present GoDaddy -- the world's leading domain registrar -- with some fresh competition. With Google Domains, you can set up a custom domain of your choosing, but Google won't actually be hosting your website. It's only handling the domain registration aspect; for everything else, the company has partnered with Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, and Shopify -- businesses that specialize in helping consumers build complete websites in mere minutes.

First, Google is promising not to charge users anything extra to conceal personal information (e.g. name and address) that must be provided when registering a URL. Lastly, there's the benefit of real customer support. Google says phone and email support will be available Monday through Friday from 9AM to 9PM EST.

If you want to use the Internet and you don’t want the National Security Agency to see what you’re doing, you basically only need one tool: Tor, a network that anonymizes web traffic by bouncing it between servers.

The NSA has been working on ways to get around "the Tor problem" for years without much success. "It should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract targets’ use of technologies to hide their communications," the agency told BusinessWeek back in January. The NSA says Tor is now used by "terrorists, cybercriminals, [and] human traffickers," so you’d think the Pentagon might consider that investment a mistake. Not so.

The military has been working on a new generation of even bigger and better anonymity tools to supplement and replace Tor. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, the Pentagon’s high-tech research lab, started working on anonymity roughly four years ago through the Safer Warfighter Communications program, a collection of tools designed to thwart blacklisting, redirection, and content filtering.

A US Appellate Court has ruled that police must obtain a warrant before collecting cellphone location data, finding that acquiring records of what cell towers a phone connected to and when it was connected to them constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.

This ruling, from the 11th Circuit, is in opposition to a ruling made nearly a year ago by a separate appellate court. While this ruling won't overturn that one because of their separate jurisdictions, it adds critical precedent to a privacy question that's still far from decided across the country.

In its reasoning, the court notes that while the Fourth Amendment has traditionally been applied to property rights, it's gradually expanded to protect much more, including communications. "In the 20th century, a second view gradually developed," the court writes, "that is, that the Fourth Amendment guarantee protects the privacy rights of the people without respect to whether the alleged 'search' constituted a trespass against property rights."

In particular, the court cites a Supreme Court ruling that found that tracking a person using a GPS unit installed in their car requires a warrant. Even though the location data of a cell site can only place the person holding the phone within a certain range, the court feels that that range is still quite detailed. In the case at hand, cell site data was used to place the defendant near the location of several robberies.

Pocket, which lets you save articles and videos to view later, is introducing a paid option. Pocket Premium -- which offers power users new features for archiving, searching, and tagging their saves -- launches for $5 a month or $42 a year.

Seven years after the company began as a bookmarklet, and two years after making its apps free to build its base of customers, the save-for-later service says it's now big enough for a "freemium" business model to make sense. At a time when webpages routinely disappear without warning, Pocket is making a bet that users will pay for peace of mind. Whether the company is right will determine its fate as an independent business.

If DirecTV fails to lock up NFL Sunday Ticket beyond this coming season, AT&T has given itself the right to back away from the colossal $48.5 billion acquisition.

The out clause contained in the proposal’s fine print shows just how valuable of a property the NFL is.

"The parties also have agreed that in the unlikely event that DirecTV’s agreement for the NFL Sunday Ticket service is not renewed substantially on the terms discussed between the parties, AT&T may elect not to consummate the merger," it reads. The careful wording also says that AT&T won’t be able to collect any damages if this scenario plays out.

DirecTV just has to prove that it "used its reasonable best efforts to obtain such renewal." And from the sounds of it, the satellite provider is already trying its best to get the deal done.

The news that AT&T had agreed to acquire DirecTV for a whopping $48.5 billion came as no surprise to observers of the pay-TV industry.

"If you think back to the ’90s the marketplace was full of small companies. We've seen wave after wave of mergers and now there are fewer and larger companies," says Jeff Kagan, an independent analyst. "Going forward were going to see even fewer and even larger competitors going forward or moving toward a national, competitive marketplace for television, telephone, Internet, wireless."

For AT&T, the deal is mainly about gaining scale in video and acquiring the bargaining power that comes with that to license premium content -- particularly with the looming specter of a tie-up between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. AT&T will combine its 5.7 million U-verse TV customers with DirecTV's roughly 20.3 million US subscribers.

"All of a sudden you're talking about the number-two pay-TV provider in the country," says Dan Rayburn, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan. "That means you can negotiate for better programming, and at a better price."

Having access to premium content is key to AT&T's ambition to become a major player in the world of streaming video. "DirecTV is way ahead of AT&T in terms of licensing deals. Something like NFL Sunday Ticket is a game-changer for AT&T if they can offer it as part of a package to their wireless customers," says Rayburn.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said the deal will allow AT&T to offer premium video on all screens, from TVs to smartphones to cars and airplanes. Just how important is big-ticket content like the NFL? The deal terms actually stipulate that AT&T can walk away from the merger if DirecTV doesn't win the contract with the NFL to renew that exclusive.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission will start deciding the future of the Internet. It’s an emotional, controversial, drawn-out battle that has been building for years, pitting some of the biggest Internet providers in the world against the government, American citizens, and virtually every denizen of the web.

A new report with previously unseen documents set to be published by New York’s Public Utility Law Project (PULP) demonstrates how Verizon deliberately moves back and forth between regulatory regimes, classifying its infrastructure either like a heavily regulated telephone network or a deregulated information service depending on its needs.

The chicanery has allowed Verizon to raise telephone rates, all the while missing commitments for high-speed Internet deployment. Why would Verizon -- which, like all big telecom companies, is generally averse to government regulation -- make a point of repeatedly noting that its fiber network fell under the same strict rules as the telephone system?

There are two reasons. First, Title II designation gives carriers broad power to compel other utilities -- power, water, and so on -- to give them access to existing infrastructure for a federally controlled price, which makes it simpler and more cost-effective for cables to be run. And that infrastructure adds up: poles, ducts, conduits running beneath roads, the list goes on.

Second, Title II gave Verizon a unique opportunity to justify boosting telephone rates in discussions with regulators, arguing that these phone calls would run over the same fiber used by FiOS, Verizon’s home Internet service.