Today the story broke about PRISM, a supposedly top-secret program at the US National Security Agency (NSA) that has been in operation since 2007.

According to The Washington Post, current intelligence reporting increasingly relies on PRISM as its main source of raw data and is used in almost 1 out of every 7 intelligence reports these days.

Here’s the basic breakdown of what’s happening so far in the story, who’s involved, what’s being looked at, and more.

Today, the fourth day of the Apple e-book anti-trust trial taking place in New York, Google’s director of strategic partnerships testified as a government witness. Thomas Turvey, under cross examination from Apple lawyer Orin Snyder, told the court that while the publishers named in the original suit had told him that they had moved to an agency model due to deals with Apple, he also acknowledged that his lawyer had helped him draft his own statement for the court, and that he was unsure of the details within the statement.

In other words, the exact opposite of what a credible witness says.

The Washington Post has reported that the NSA has created a $20 million spy program called PRISM, that has been allowed to directly access citizens’ private data on Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple servers – the company joined the program in that order as well..

Both Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple have all denied any involvement in the PRISM program, however, the Washington Post’s story alleges that the companies “participate knowingly in PRISM operations.”

PRISM was started in 2007 when Microsoft became the first corporate partner. Apple demonstrated the most resistance to the program and held out for five years before joining in 2012.

Here’s what data PRISM collects, according to the Post:

Yesterday we reported that Joseph Brown, the young developer behind the recent carrier hacks, had found evidence that carriers are throttling iPhone and iPad data speeds without cause.

After investigating into Brown’s report (which has been deleted), AnandTech published its own investigation into the matter that proves Brown’s throttling claims are not true.

In his article, Brian Klug gives on general reason of why the iPhone throttling conspiracy is false:

There are hundreds of apps on the App Store that claim they’ll help you boost your productivity, keep your thoughts organized, and help you finish all of those great side project ideas you have floating around. Some of those apps are genuinely helpful, but famed Apple-blogger John Gruber just released a new note-taking app that challenges them all.

Vesper is a sublime note-taking app for iPhone that just hit the App Store. Its price tag is a bit steeper than most apps, but even at $4.99 it’s a pretty good deal. Designed by John Gruber’s new company, Q Branch, Vesper is a hybrid of notes and list-making features that helps you keep your thoughts organized.

“What’s the difference between a thought, an idea, and something you want to do? I don’t know exactly. That’s why we made Vesper.” – John Gruber

Location services are really an integral part of a ton of iOS apps, using the internal GPS system to add Instagram photos to a map, checkin with FourSquare or Facebook, or let your friends know where you are with one of many “on my way” apps, like Glympse or Twist.

If you’re battery is dying, however, the location services are the first thing you should turn off, as they suck up a lot of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch’s power needs, what with their background data sending and receiving and such.

Here’s how to turn them off.

Pan Am, a U.S icon that died in 1991, thankfully before it’s name could be ConCatenAted into PanAm, and not before some clever entrepreneur with an eye to the future squirreled away dome of the planes’ old life rafts.

Fast forward to today, when those rafts are being chopped up and made into cases for another American icon: the iPad. For just $20, you can wrap the back of your tablet in a strip of – uh, whatever life rafts were made of in the 70s.

I have been using one on my iPad mini for the last week or two. It’s fantastic, but I had to administer some tough love to get it onto shape.

In an effort to boost iPhone unit sales, Apple is planning to roll out a new trade-in iPhone program later this month, according to a new report from Peter Burrows at Bloomberg.

Details on the new iPhone trade-in program are scant right now, but according to the report Apple is teaming up with Brightstar Corp. to run the exchange program. The new trade-in program will only be available at Apple retail stores, and should serve as a big incentive to get customers to upgrade their iPhone 4 and 4s units to an iPhone 5. 

I’m not going to list all the problems with Apple’s iPhotos for OS X. I’ll just say that it’s clunky, slow, the library bloats as fast as a mob informer that’s been dumped in the Hudson, Photo Stream doesn’t work reliably and – every frikkin time I switch back to the app – it flips to the “Last Import” section in the source list. So I set out to find an alternative. This article will tell you all about my final choice – called Pixa – and a little bit about the alternatives.

VSCO Cam has already become one of our favorite camera apps on the iPhone thanks to its film emulation effects and clean interface, but a big update for the app is making us fall in love all over again.

Visual Supply Company just released VSCO Cam 2.0 on the App Store and it comes with a huge batch of new features, including new presets, more efficient editing, and separate Focus and Exposure rings that give you more control when shooting pictures.

Best of all, Visual Supply Co. dropped the price on VSCO from $0.99 to free so there’s no reason for you not to give it a whirl. You can pick it up from the App Store now, or dig into the full list of new features after the jump:

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The iPad is pretty great for photographers, but in typical Apple fashion, if you want to really use the device then you keep knocking up against crazy and annoying limits. The most obvious of these is probably the whole iPhoto/iPhoto problem: two apps, for Mac an iOS, that share a name but little else. They certainly don’t share their photos.

So what would I like to see fixed in iOS7? Here’s a list, complete with some suggestions for making things better

This Cult of Mac Deals offer won’t just save you time on your Mac, but it will save you money as well. That’s right. We’ve partnered with 2 great developers to bring you The Double Down Mac Bundle! You pay what you want for Find Any File and if you pay more than the average price, you’ll also receive Shortcuts.

But you’re not just saving money and helping developers with this offer. We’ve also chosen three charities: Child’s Play Charity, World Wildlife Fund, and Creative Commons, that we believe make a significant and positive impact across the globe. 10% of your entire purchase will go to help whichever charity you choose.

Jason Citron is a veteran of both the console and gaming space, involved with developing Double Fine’s Brutal Legend in 2006, and then releasing one of the first hit iOS games in the early, heady days of the iOS App store, a match-three puzzle game with a twist, Aurora Feint. Soon after, he created OpenFeint, which was the de facto leaderboard and multiplayer matching system for Apple mobile devices long before Game Center.

After OpenFeint was sold to Japanese social-gaming company, GREE, in April of 2011, Jason headed out to engage his passion for video game development once again with a new company, Hammer & Chisel, and a new game, announced today, called Fates Forever, an iPad-only massively online battle arena (MOBA) game.

Citron took some time out of a busy schedule to talk to Cult of Mac about the new game, it’s mechanics and business strategy, and his own take on what iPad games should be.

T-Mobile U.K. has confirmed that BlackBerry Messenger for Android and iOS will arrive on June 27. That means we have exactly three weeks to wait until BlackBerry’s hugely popular chat service goes cross-platform, and you can see exactly what it will look like on Android in the photo above.

Mail Pilot, the email client that was born on Kickstarter and first hit iOS back in April, is coming to the Mac. We don’t have a release for it yet, but if you’re itching to get your hands on it, you can sign up for the public beta today. 

When we talk about the Android/iOS wars, we often talk about it as a purely binary conflict. If one side wins, the other side must lose.

According to the latest Flurry Mobile Report, though, that simply isn’t true. There’s room for two kings, and while Android has surpassed iOS in overall marketshare, people spend much more time in-app on iOS.

Casemakers are known to gamble on upcoming iOS product launches. Every day they can have their product on the shelves closer to launch is a day they have a leg up over their competitors in the hyper-competitive case market.

Case in point, here’s a story about Hard Candy Cases gambled (and lost) $50,000 on iPhone 4S moldings from China to get their cases first-to-market. When the iPhone 4S actually debuted, though, it looked identical to the 4, instead of the radical redesign the case makers expected. Oops.

Now the same case maker is doing the same thing, gambling on the iPad 5 launch. This time, though, Tim Hickman has less to lose.

Logitech has today announced that it is acquiring TT Design Labs, a two-person startup responsible for the TidyTilt cover for iPhone. The deal will make Logitech the owner of TT’s assets, and the accessory giant has already made the TidyTilt available to pre-order.

Google’s YouTube apps for Android and iOS have helped the company triple advertising sales on mobile in the past six months, the company has said. Mobile ads now contribute an estimated $350 million to YouTube’s revenue, with around a quarter of the site’s 1 billion users accessing videos on smartphones and tablets.

https://youtu.be/2Azoteu5nzs

I am a snorer. This should not be taken to mean that I make soft, puppy-like growling sounds in the back of my throat as I sleep. In fact, if you happened to hold that puppy up within six inches of my face while I sawed logs, it is likely that all of the flesh, fur and musculature of that baby dog would be vortexed off its skeleton only to become lodged in the yawning chasms of my throat and nostrils. My snore is the sound of the Seventh Seal being opened, or the universe tearing itself asunder. In all probability? You have never heard anything like me.

So imagine my poor girlfriend, who sleeps next to me every night as the bed vibrates, the house shakes and the ceiling buckles with my snoring. As you might well imagine, she’s eager for me to do something about my snoring.

And what do you know? There’s a new app for just that. It’s called Snorelab.

The current Internet scuttlebutt has it that when Tim Cook takes the stage on Monday for the WWDC keynote, he will not only unveil iOS 7, but a new, flatter ‘look’ for the entire mobile operating system spearheaded by Jony Ive. This would bring the look of iOS closer to modern design principles employed by the likes of Google and Microsoft, and finally flush Scott Forstall’s skeuomorphism turd.

Developer Steve King wanted to give people an idea what a redesigned iOS 7 with flatter, less skeuomorphic design elements would really look like, so he mocked up a flatter iOS 7. But what makes King’s mock-up even more existing is it’s all done in HTML, CSS and Javascript (no images!), meaning it’s fully interactive in any browser.

I use a lot of different devices — I’m always switching smartphones — so I store all my photos in Dropbox so that I can get at them no matter which platform I happen to be using. But it’s not always easy to get all the photos I’ve imported into iPhoto into the cloud. At least not yet.

But that’s about to change. In the latest Dropbox for Mac beta, you can finally import your iPhoto library.

Instead of just selling you a new phone, Apple is now doing in-store screen repairs on broken iPhones… and this is the monster machine doing the repairs.

Yes, I’m totally making fun of those “lose belly fat” ads you might see all over the internet (or maybe it’s just me) with that headline, but the truth is, while many Mac users may know that hitting Command-Tab will bring up the Task Switcher in OS X, they may still be doomed to endlessly loop through their running apps with that keyboard shortcut.

If you’re running a lot of apps, that’s a lot of wasted time. Time that could be better spent actually in the apps you’re cycling through in and ever more frustrating rightward bound loop of task switching.

Great news, FPS fans! Gameloft has today unveiled its first teaser trailer for Modern Combat 5, the next chapter in its hugely popular mobile shooter franchise. Check it out below.