Elise Hu

Updated 3:14 a.m ET.

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon is sending the National Guard to Ferguson to help restore order. He signed the executive order after another night of violence. In a statement, Nixon said the guard's help is needed to "restore peace and order and to protect the citizens ...

Amid ongoing tension over the shooting death of an unarmed teen, churches are telling their parishioners that now is the time for tough conversations.

When nearly 1.1 million net neutrality comments flooded the Federal Communications Commission this spring into the summer, they came from around the country. But the interest in open-Internet topics doesn't spread out evenly across the United States.

San Francisco-based data analysis firm Quid looked at the geographic sources of ...

When the Federal Communications Commission asked for public comments about the issue of keeping the Internet free and open, the response was huge. So huge, in fact, that the FCC's platform for receiving comments twice got knocked offline because of high traffic, and the deadline was extended because ...

From its base in south central Russia, the relatively small group has reportedly collected passwords along with user names and email addresses.

We know you don't miss a single NPR headline, but just in case you did, here's our weekly look back at what we covered in digital culture, and what we recommend from our friends across the mediascape.

ICYMI

Not OK, Cupid: On the heels of Facebook's much-maligned revelation that it ...

As tech companies know well, users can be an unruly lot. And with their voices amplified on social media, they can be downright nasty when they're displeased. Such is the case for Foursquare, the location-based check-in app that boasted 50 million users worldwide. Last week, Foursquare formally spun off ...

You know how it feels. You're a moderately frequent business traveler and trying to get some work done from your hotel. But you're slowed — and sometimes stalled — by an intermittent Internet connection. Your hotel Wi-Fi has the download speeds of an early 1990s dial-up connection.

It happens too ...

One-click online shopping is changing how we shop. Stores with leases as short as a day are proliferating — meaning a storefront can be a designer clothing store one day and a test kitchen the next.

The last time the FCC saw this much public interest was after the Janet Jackson Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction. But research shows comments aren't likely to sway the agency's policy decision.

A Comcast service call making the rounds this week sounded really familiar to millions of Americans. But some companies have figured out how to make the universally unpleasant experience a lot better.

Ryan Block, whose hilariously tedious customer service experience with Comcast struck a chord with millions, says the customer service rep who harangued him should not be fired.

In a phone call that went viral (more than 4 million audio plays and counting), Block tries and nearly fails to ...

Heavy traffic to the FCC's commenting site crashed it on Tuesday. That was the original deadline for the public to weigh in on a controversial Internet proposal. You now have until Friday to comment.

Apple announced on Tuesday a deal with the company it once painted as Big Brother in its infamous 1984 ad: IBM.

The former rivals agreed on an exclusive partnership to work together on new business applications for Apple's iPads and iPhones. As part of the deal, IBM will also ...

When a customer service call is described as "Kafkaesque" and "hellish," you pretty much know how it's going to go down before even taking a listen. But in case you haven't heard the condescending, tedious call that's lit up the Internet, here it is:

The recording starts after the ...

It's not just comedian John Oliver coming out against cable companies to support net neutrality. The world's largest Internet companies — Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon and others — have officially chimed in, filing comments Monday to the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees Internet traffic.

The tech companies are ...

Summertime in the tech world has made us eager for some lighter news, which you can find below. But the weightier legal battles in technology continue, as highlighted in our Big Conversation section. And links we think you should see are filed under Curiosities. Have a great weekend, readers.

ICYMI

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For reasons I can't fully understand, the Internet loves its cats. Keyboard Cat and Grumpy Cat are household names, I Can Haz Cheezeburger is a digital empire, and my real-life cats are on a social networking site called Catster (this is not a joke).

So you've got to ...

Is a burrito a sandwich? The answer may sound simple to you ... but the question gets at the very heart of a tension that's existed for ages.

What we know as the World Wide Web — the main way by which most of us access the Internet — just turned 25 this year. Its existence has allowed for all kinds of learning and free expression, coding and making, rule-breaking and platform-making. One American researcher even links ...