Twitter acquires SnappyTV, the service for clipping, editing, and sharing video clips from live broadcasts  —  SnappyTV is joining the flock  —  One of the best ways to follow events as they unfold is through real-time videos on Twitter.  As we continue to invest in video …

US Marshals Service leaks list of participants in the auction of 30,000 Silk Road bitcoins  —  CONFIRMED: List of Possible Silk Road Bitcoin Bidders Leaked by US Marshals  —  UPDATE (22:25 BST): Updated with comment from Lynzey Donahue, a U.S. Marshals spokeswoman.

Why Did Amazon Make a Phone?  A Conversation With Jeff Bezos  —  Shortly after he introduced the new Fire phone on Wednesday, I spoke with Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon's founder and chief executive, about the device and Amazon's goals in the smartphone business.  —  Here is an edited transcript of our discussion.

T-Mobile is setting a dangerous precedent for wireless net neutrality with its Music Freedom initiative  —  T-Mobile's ‘Music Freedom’ is a great feature — and a huge problem  —  It sounds great, but it's really, really, really bad  —  Net neutrality has seen headier days, and to be honest …

iOS 8 exposes almost every manual camera control possible, allows third-party apps access to all  —  Manual Camera Controls in iOS 8  —  For the longest time, iOS had almost no camera controls at all.  There would be a toggle for HDR, a toggle to switch to the front-facing camera, and a toggle to switch to video recording mode.

Supreme Court rules software patents that cover ‘abstract ideas’ are invalid  —  Software patents aren't dead, but they just took a blow.  In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that a series of banking patents didn't cover a concrete software process but an abstract idea …

Early-Stage VC Greycroft Closes $200M Growth Fund  —  Greycroft Partners, a New York firm that saw its early investments in Maker Studios, Buddy Media, Huffington Post and Braintree Payments Solutions turn into large payouts, has now closed on its first growth fund at $200 million.

NY AG: iPhone's activation lock reduces phone thefts; Android and Windows Phone to also have kill switches  —  Android, Windows Phone Will Have Kill Switches, N.Y. Says  —  Google Inc. (GOOGL) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) will incorporate a “kill switch” into the next versions …

Codecademy Partners With Google And DonorsChoose To Boost Girls' Interest In Computer Science  —  Programming education startup Codecademy is announcing a new initiative with a stated goal “to double the number of high school girls studying Computer Science.”

Code Spaces closes shop after attackers destroy Amazon-hosted customer data  —  Code Spaces closes shop after attackers destroy Amazon-hosted customer data.  —  A code-hosting service that boasted having a full recovery plan has abruptly closed after someone gained unauthorized access …

BlackBerry Q1: $23 million in profit, beats analyst expectations  —  Summary: BlackBerry is in the midst of turning from hardware to services, and the restructuring appears to be fruitful.  The company still experienced losses in Q1, but the financial result is not as bad as expected.  —  Charlie Osborne

T-Mobile Offering Weeklong iPhone “Test Drive” to Lure Customers  —  Pulling a page from the car dealer's manual, T-Mobile is offering would-be customers a free seven-day trial of its network using an iPhone 5s.  —  “You [can] have a seven-night stand,” CEO John Legere said in an interview …

Puppet Labs lands $40M in funding to boost its IT automation work  —  DevOps-centric Puppet Labs closed a series E $40 million investment round, bringing its total funding to $86 million.  The IT automation company plans on using the cash to expand globally and invest in research and development.

Sources say Box hopes to complete IPO by July-August; contrary to rumors, has ruled out sale  —  Box Revives IPO Plans as Cloud Shares Recover  —  Timing is everything.  And cloud storage company Box could not have picked a worse time to go public.  —  The March 24th public disclosure …

As Iraq censors Internet, Tor usage jumps tenfold  —  As the Iraqi government censors large swaths of the Internet following devastating attacks and victories by the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), thousands of people are adopting Tor, the most popular anonymizing tool online, to get around government obstruction.

President Obama at the White House Maker Faire: “Today's D.I.Y. Is Tomorrow's ‘Made in America’”  —  “Our parents and our grandparents created the world's largest economy and strongest middle class not by buying stuff, but by building stuff — by making stuff, by tinkering and inventing and building …

NSA ‘third party’ partners tap the Internet backbone in global surveillance program  —  ‘Third parties’ give NSA access to international fiber-optic cables, sharing massive amounts of phone and Internet data, new Snowden documents show.  Germany and, by all accounts, Denmark …

Facebook Goes Down In Global Outage.  Update: It's Back!  —  Facebook appears to be a suffering a major outage this morning, with the site unavailable in multiple regions around the world, and Facebook social plug-ins on other websites also acting up.  —  The Facebook.com site is unavailable …