Flat Press

Spotify has millions of active users who don't pay a cent for the service, they just opt to hear advertising on the streaming music service instead of paying a monthly fee.
The one catch is that free listening is only available on computers. However, this could soon change.
Spotify is reportedly in the midst of planning free, ad-supported, mobile music streaming, according to The Wall Street Journal. This means users will be able to listen to music on the go via their smartphones and tablets.
According to the Journal, the purported free mobile service will let users play a few songs on demand, but will mostly act as a radio station, much like Pandora and Rdio. For their part, Pandora has long offered free, ad-supported, mobile music streaming, and Rdio introduced a similar feature in October.

When most people lose a dog, they put up posters, call the local animal shelters, and perhaps post an ad on Craigslist. Reddit contributor p1percub turned to the massive online community earlier this week and posted to the Houston subreddit with a plea for help.

Jack the pit/lab mix got away from p1percub, ran into the street, was hit by a truck, and took off at a pace the redditor couldn't keep up with. She posted an Imgur photo that generated nearly 40,000 views. Local redditors got busy sharing the image around, creating a digital dragnet for the lost pooch.

This is where redditor Hominine comes in. He saw the post and later spotted Jack in a grocery store parking lot. He followed the wandering pup as Jack ran back to the exact location he was lost from in the first place. A third party, who had been on the lookout after a Reddit-induced alert sent out to animal groups, made the actual call to the owner with the dog's location.

Big Brother may be watching you. But Glenn Greenwald is watching Big Brother.

That's not a bad take on how the 46-year-old constitutional-law attorney turned crusading journalist turned thorn in the side of the NSA might describe his mission.

At least in part. Greenwald is doing more than just watching. By combing through the tens of thousands of classified NSA documents leaked to him by Edward Snowden -- and publishing in newspapers around the globe report after report on the secretive agency's mass-spying activities -- he's got the whole world watching too.

Through his efforts, he's looking not only to buttress the Bill of Rights and protect the sanctity of privacy -- he also wants nothing less than to stop the Internet from being warped into what he fears would be "probably the most effective means of human control and oppression ever known" -- a technology that allows "people's every thought and word to be comprehensively chronicled" by the "surveillance state."

It isn’t just the big phone makers who are jumping into the oversized phablet market. Lesser-known companies are entering the huge screen scrum too. For example, the $299 Life View from Miami-based handset creator Blu features a large 5.7-inch LCD screen that’s bright, colorful, and engaging. The device is a handful too, in the same league as the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and HTC One Max, yet feels solid, well-crafted, and not terribly unwieldy. I also appreciate how the Life View serves up Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and a sharp 12 megapixel camera at its affordable unlocked price. Heck, the gadget even has dual SIM card slots if you’re into that kind of thing. Of course the smartphone’s off-brand processor and lack of LTE leave me cold and are serious detractors for mobile power users.

Android-based Google TV has struggled to find its footing, but the planned reboot of Google's Web-enabled television box next year could come with a familiar name.

The set-top box could be called Nexus TV, tying the Google TV redo to the company's successful line of flagship Android phones and tablets, according to a report Friday in The Information (subscription required).