Apple’s annual Back to School promotion has returned for the 2014 school season. As always, students who buy a new Mac, iPad or iPhone will receive a free Apple Store gift card with their purchase. Buying any Mac other than a Mac Mini will net students a $100 gift card while the purchase of an iPad or an iPhone includes a $50 gift card. College students, parents and faculty who qualify for education pricing will receive an additional discount from Apple as well.

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Just weeks after Apple’s surprising acquisition of Beats Music, Google announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Songza, another popular music streaming service. Although Google doesn’t have any immediate plans to change Songza, the company plans to integrate aspects of the service into Google Play Music in the coming months. For now, existing users won’t see any differences.

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T-Mobile CEO John Legere has been utterly merciless when it comes to trolling his bigger rivals at Verizon and AT&T and now they’re going to have a chance to return the favor. Legere, who recently controversially accused AT&T and Verizon of “raping you for every penny you have,” now finds that his own company is being accused of swindling customers out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

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It wasn’t exactly pretty and no firm statements were made last Thursday, but USA managed to advance to the round of 16 despite its 0-1 loss to Germany. The World Cup is really heating up now that we’re into the knockout stages of the tournament, and USA will need to beat Belgium on Tuesday if it hopes to keep chasing the cup. Oddsmakers have Belgium as the favorite but USA has stunned the world so far, having escaped the “group of death” that sports analysts gave the scrappy team almost no chance of advancing through. In other words, anything can happen.

Do you want to watch Tuesday’s huge USA vs. Belgium match but you don’t have access to a TV? Here, we’ll tell you how to stream all the action live to your computer, tablet or smartphone for free.

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Just how truly terrible was the first-generation Samsung Galaxy Gear? It was so bad that even Samsung’s marketing wizards had a tough time making ads for it that weren’t horrible. And it was also so bad that Steve Wozniak, who despite being Apple’s cofounder isn’t afraid to criticize Apple or praise rival products such as the Microsoft Surface, couldn’t stand to use it for more than a day.

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In what might be the “Uncarrier’s” worst blunder in years, T-Mobile is being sued by the Federal Trade Commission after it was discovered that the “uncarrier” has been placing bogus charges on customers’ phone bills for “premium” SMS texting subscriptions, which in many cases were never authorized by the subscriber. It is estimated that T-Mobile made hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of this unsavory practice.

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Google’s Material Design isn’t just there to make your phone’s UI look better — it’s also there to make your phone more functional. Droid Life picks up on a new change that Google has made to Android L with Material Design that could really improve multitasking functionality on the device in way that we haven’t seen before.

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It wasn’t long ago that Android overtook iOS as the most popular mobile platform in the United States, but as the release of Apple’s first large screen phone approaches, Android’s lead is beginning to look insurmountable. According to the latest data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Android now holds 61.9% of the U.S. market share to Apple’s 32.5%, the lowest percentage iOS has captured since the iPhone 4s launched in 2011.

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The United States National Security Agency has had a rough year. It all began when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden infiltrated the agency’s systems and stole thousands upon thousands of confidential documents revealing many of the top-secret cyber surveillance programs the NSA has employed in recent years. The revelations began with PRISM but there have now been so many that it may be a good time for a quick recap.

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There are so many mobile apps out there — and most of them are terrible — that it can be hard to find those rare diamonds in the rough. To get a better handle on which apps out there are actually good, we periodically check out apps that Android fan communities are recommending to help you discover apps that are vastly more useful than the latest Flappy Bird or Yo clone. With this in mind, we’ve combed through the latest thread highlighting under-appreciated apps over at Reddit’s Android community to pick out four gems we think are worthy of your attention.

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