You don't have to go far to see someone walking around and texting on their iPhone. you also don't have to wait long to see some of these people run into something or someone while looking at their phone instead of what's going on around them. Apple has a patent application that shows a system called transparent texting.

The idea is that the rear camera of the smartphone would be used to grab a live video image of what is behing the smartphone. That way the person texting and walking could see what is behind the phone as they move around. Naturally, this would require the person texting to hold the phone straight up in front of their face.

Most of the people I see are walking and looking down at the phone. In that instance, having what is behind the phone in the background behind a text conversation would do no good. The Apple patent app was field with the USPTO on Thursday of this week according to reports.

If you are old enough to remember the 80's, you will recall the giant boom box radios that people carried around to listen too. Those things ate more D-cell batteries than a decent family could afford. Pyle Audio has announced the launch of a new product called the Street Blaster that is a modern interpretation of a boom box from the 80's.

You don't get dual cassette decks in this thing. What you do get is Bluetooth, a guitar input, NFC tech, a rechargeable battery, and a 1000W amp. Pyle doesn't say how large the battery is, but I have to wonder with that much power and wireless features just how long the battery will last.

If you have a device that doesn't support playback via Bluetooth, the Street Blaster does have a 3.5mm input. It also has a microphone input as well. I would assume that to mean you can hook a mic to it and use it like a PA system.

LG unveiled a new smartphone last month at Mobile World Congress called the G2 Mini. The smartphone is a solid mid-range offering that was promised for a global launch this month. This week marked the launch that mid-range device.

The G2 mini has a 4.7-inch screen and a nice 2440 mAh internal battery that is removable. Removable batteries are a big deal for smartphone users who spend a lot of time on the phone and away from an outlet. With a removable battery, you can swap batteries and keep working.

The phone uses a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm processor and has 8GB of internal storage. The resolution of that 4.7-unch screen is 960 x 540. The Qualcomm processor is paired with 1GB of RAM and the G2 mini has a memory card slot for storage expansion.

If you are a big twitter fan, the service has announced some updates that will make it a bit more social. On networks like Facebook, you can attach multiple photos to your posts and tag people in the photos that you want to see it. Twitter hasn't had that capability.

In the past, it was one photo per tweet and if you wanted someone to see it, you had to use the trusty "@" to do the trick. Twitter announced this week that it was adding two new features that will change all that. The new features include the ability to tag people in photos that you are posting and put multiple photos in a single tweet.

Twitter also now supports up to four photos in the tweet. The cool part about support for photo tagging is that you can tag up to ten people in a single image and not use any of your 140 characters to do it. If you are tagged in a photo, you will receive a notification.

Just when it seemed that eBay has finally stabilized their ever changing fee and user structures, Australian users have been slugged with an additional new 10% postage charge in an email sent out to registered users earlier today.

Under the auspices of the otherwise innocently named "Changes to the fee structure", from May 6th sellers will now be charged a flat 9.9% fee on the price of all goods sold, including the price that sellers charge for postage. Whilst eBay are continuing to encourage sellers to not charge buyers for postage, TweakTown has spoken to a number of sellers disgusted to eBay's latest fee hike, whom have indicated that they will have no choice but to charge higher rates for postage to compensate for this charge.

Some have indicated that this change will unfairly target Australians in favor of overseas sellers, whose cost of shipping goods is negligible, compared to the rising costs of shipping goods via Australia Post.

In a double whammy, the Fareit Trojan targeting Microsoft Windows PCs also has been found to spread the Cribit ransomware, as security researchers transition to defend against sophisticated cyber threats.

There are two versions of Cribit in the wild - one version encrypts files on the infected PC and shows an English ransom, while the other version has messages also available in Chinese, French, Arabic and Spanish, researchers note.

"After all, cybercriminals are after one goal: to get a person's money," said Christopher Budd, Trend Micro threat communications manager, in a statement to SC Magazine. "Returning/decrypting a victim's files won't certainly be a priority or major concern for these people. Additionally, paying the ransom may encourage and help expand the operations of cybercriminals."

Leaks are something everyone has come to expect when it comes to new mobile devices that are preparing for launch. Take the recently launched HTC One M8 for example, the device was leaked several weeks in advance, and almost every single rumor and leaked imaged turned out to be 100-percent accurate. While companies like HTC and Samsung may not care much about early leaks, BlackBerry appears to not only care, but putting a plan into action to snub would-be leaksters before they have a chance to divulge product information.

BlackBerry's CEO, John Chen, said that he is no longer taking leaks of the company's products lightly, and anyone caught leaking images, products, or any IP will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. While he did not mention what recent leak has him so fired up, we suspect that it was the recent outing of the upcoming BlackBerry 10.3 build and a string of smaller leaks that divulged upcoming project codenames.

"One of the most frustrating things for all of us at BlackBerry is when a critical and confidential project is reported in the media before we are ready to discuss it. Leaks are, at their best, distracting, and at their worst downright misleading to our stakeholders. The business implications of a leak are seldom advantageous," Chen said in the company's blog. "This is why I want to make you aware that, right now, we are pursuing legal action against a party who stole confidential information about a future BlackBerry product and made that information public. This person falsely posed as an employee of one of our carrier partners to obtain access to secured networks."

We all know by now that the FBI, CIA and NSA request information on us from big tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, but did you know that Microsoft sends a massive invoice every time it gives away your private information? A newly released document shows that at least in one incident, Microsoft billed the government as much as $15,600 for information that was requested.

The Syrian Electronic Army hacker group has just leaked details that show Microsoft billing the US government more than $350,000 on September 5th of 2013. The invoice appears to show that more than 78 invoices for request were sent to the government, with the highest being shown set at a whopping $15,600.00.

The government agency in question is the FBI's Digital Intercept Technology Unit. The leaked documents show that Microsoft was billing the FBI more than $100,000 per month on average between 2012 and 2013, and that each individual request cost the FBI $100 during 2012 and into 2013 until Microsoft raised the price to $200 per request.

Xbox One and Xbox 360 gamers have some new apps to keep them occupied between gaming sessions. Microsoft has announced the launch of some new apps for both consoles this week. Gamers on the Xbox 360 will get access to the Major League Gaming app.

The app will allow you to watch live gaming tournaments and other content. Xbox One gamers also get access to the MLB.TV app that brings live Major League Baseball games to the console. The app requires Xbox Live Gold and a MLB.TV Premium subscription to watch the games.

Xbox 360 gamers also get access to some more movie streaming apps with the launch of Encore Play and Moviplex Play. The apps both require that you have a subscription to the networks on a participating cable or satellite provider.

Quad-copters are being used these days for everything from aerial footage of disasters, to amazing footage from inside an active volcano eruption. Today I came across a video that takes quad-copters to an entirely new level of usefulness. In the video seen below, a father is seen attaching a string to his young son's loose tooth, and then uses a quad-copter to yank the tooth right out of the kids head. I am not exactly sure if this is exciting, or terrifying, but it does make for a damned good story to tell.

Some people are calling this story a hoax, but I think it is quite real. Quad-copters of the size seen in the video are capable of lifting their own weight plus the weight of a camera setup, so I am sure this one has enough lift to yank an ill-fated tooth out of the child's mouth. I am in the process of building my own quad-copter and when finished, it should be able to lift a DSLR, Lens, and GoPro camera with ease, so something like a very loose tooth should be no issue. Do you think that multi-rotor aircraft are a viable replacement for dentist? Let us know in the comments.

The quad-copter seen in the video appears to be a DJI Phantom 2 Vision FPV, that features gimble mount for a GoPro camera for FPV video recording, so it should have more than enough lift to remove the tooth with ease. Judging by the $1200 price tag, a trip to the dentist or even a pair of pliers wrapped in a towel would have been a far cheaper solution, but where is the fun in that?