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Tech Week That Was: Bitcoin Bust, Twitter IPO, Siri Outed

The tech news kept a-comin' this week, so we've got a lot to cover in our weekly roundup. Here we go ...

ICYMI

Our series on All Tech was called Your Digital Trail, a four-day look into how "vivid the typical person's digital picture has become — and how easy it can be for others to see it." It's a collaboration between NPR and the Center for Investigative Reporting and explored government and private company access to your data and the larger legal issues surrounding it. If you missed it, here are Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. It's worth creating your own podcast with the NPR News app to listen.

Also on the airwaves, we covered the glitchy and slow starts for the new health exchange marketplace sites under the Affordable Care Act; Sami Yenigun introduced listeners to Storyful, which helps verify citizen video that's uploaded to places like YouTube; and Laura Sydell reported on California's new anti-revenge porn law.

On the blog, we wondered who's behind the new "Your Data Should Belong To The NSA" billboard in California and reviewed the news that the Federal Aviation Administration may soon let us use our electronics during an entire flight. And, as our Weekly Innovation, we featured a dad's re-engineering of the tooth fairy delivery system.

The Big Conversation(s)

Twitter gave us a never-before-seen look at its finances when it filed for its IPO on Thursday. We learned that it's growing revenue fast, but not making money yet. And mobile is a great potential growth area for the social media company. Earlier in the week, the tech world was rocked by news that FBI agents took down the Bitcoin-powered Silk Road, the largest black market bazaar on the Internet, and arrested its owner, Ross Ulbricht. Turns out Dread Pirate Roberts, as Ulbricht was known, made a sloppy mistake in keeping his identity hidden that led the feds right to him. Here's a look at what we know about the ill-fated mastermind.

What Caught Our Eye

The Two-Way: Siri, Who Are You? She Won't Say, But Her ID's Been Blown

Voice actor Susan Bennett stepped forward to tell CNN that she's the voice behind "classic" Siri on Apple's U.S. iPhones and iPads.

Instagram blog: Instagram's A Growing Business

Facebook bought Instagram for a cool $1 billion. Now, it needs to make money.

The Verge: Snapchat's Next Big Thing

Challenging Facebook's News Feed, the service that makes your texts disappear within seconds is now introducing stories that don't just disappear but stick around for a while.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

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In 'Egghead,' A New Shel: Burnham Takes On Silverstein

Bo Burnham got his start in comedy on the internet, rather than in clubs. He found fame on YouTube and parlayed millions of views into a thriving career. Now, he's turned to the printed page with Egghead: or, You Can't Survive On Ideas Alone, a collection of comedic poetry modeled on Shel Silverstein.
NPR

School Pulls All-Beef Burgers From Menu, Citing Complaints

Students in a Virginia school system are now eating hamburgers with additives in them, after officials heeded their complaints about the appearance and taste of all-beef burgers it had been serving. The burgers that are now being served include a reported 26 ingredients.
NPR

What's The Cost Of Budget Gridlock?

Renee Montagne talks to David Wessel, economics editor of The Wall Street Journal, about the cost of the government shutdown, and the dangers of the threatened government default.
NPR

Wanted: A New Generation of High-Tech Aviation Workers

Millions of U.S. factory jobs have been lost in the past decade. Now, in North Carolina, high school students are being encouraged to think about taking manufacturing jobs. But this isn't the furniture-making or textile labor of generations past — it's a new kind of highly technical work in aviation.

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