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

A voice actor has come forward to say she is the voice behind Siri on American iPhones.
Oli Scarff
/
Getty Images
A voice actor has come forward to say she is the voice behind Siri on American iPhones.

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 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Elise Hu is a host-at-large based at NPR West in Culver City, Calif. Previously, she explored the future with her video series, Future You with Elise Hu, and served as the founding bureau chief and International Correspondent for NPR's Seoul office. She was based in Seoul for nearly four years, responsible for the network's coverage of both Koreas and Japan, and filed from a dozen countries across Asia.