Wall Street Journal

BuzzFeed has become a destination for young, pop-culture aficionados through its hearty offering of TV-themed stories, lists and quizzes such as “What Would Your ‘Game of Thrones’ Name Be?” Now, the online publisher is offering TV networks a chance to align their brands more closely to BuzzFeed’s.

BuzzFeed is offering to let TV networks use its brand name for on-air and digital promotions for their shows. Cable channels IFC and Bravo, which have quietly tested the service in recent months, have signed on as launch partners.

The service is part of an expansion of an existing BuzzFeed marketing offering to TV networks, which already pay the site to create stories deemed to be of interest to the shows’ target audiences. The so-called “sponsored content” is distinguished from regular editorial stories and makes clear that the story was created on behalf of the advertising brand.

The new advertising services highlight how BuzzFeed, an online publisher which creates content designed to be shared through social media, is attempting to become a more important venue for entertainment advertising -- a market that big social media sites and online publishers are targeting aggressively.

US regulators said a vulnerability in banks' computer networks could have exposed sensitive information to hackers, and they instructed both small institutions and Wall Street firms to update their security systems.

The alert from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council said the "Heartbleed" encryption bug may have allowed hackers to access the private "keys" to banks' servers, allowing them to decrypt and view sensitive information.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, one of the members of the council, said it wasn't aware of attackers exploiting the Heartbleed flaw that became public in recent days but said banks should assume that their security systems may have been breached. Regulators said hackers may have accessed sensitive information without the banks' knowledge.

Amazon.com said video streams on its Prime Instant Video service nearly tripled year-over-year, helped along by the company's heavy spending on original shows and new content.

"We've invested hundreds of millions of dollars in great TV shows and movies for Prime members and it's working," said Bill Carr, vice president of digital video and music for Amazon.

The announcement comes about a week after Amazon unveiled a $99 set-top box, called Fire TV, for streaming video and games, which should allow the company to reduce its dependence on other hardware manufacturers such as Roku to deliver its streaming-video service to televisions.

Samsung is the still the king of the US smartphone marketing race, but the Korean giant’s rivals closed its huge lead with an advertising blitz in 2013.

All told, seven of the top US smartphone makers spent a tad over $1.3 billion in 2013 on ads across TV, print, online, radio and outdoor venues, up 33% from 2012 spending of about $1 billion, according to ad research and consulting firm Kantar Media. Spending in the telecom category as a whole grew more than 8%, about nine times faster than the total US ad market that grew 0.9%, said Kantar Media chief research officer Jon Swallen.

The numbers reflect the rising intensity of the smartphone race and highlight the growing role that device makers play in wireless marketing as carriers focus their advertising on service plans or network quality instead of devices, as they did in the past. Samsung outspent Apple by $68 million in 2012, but the iPhone maker responded with a TV-led counter-attack and closed the ad spending gap to just $12 million as Samsung dialed back its outlays.

Residents and business owners in Carbon Hill (AL) got a surprise in letters from AT&T in February. The company said the town, where signs welcome visitors to "the city with a future," could usher in one of the biggest technological changes since Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone.

AT&T and Verizon are racing to replace their phone networks with new technology. The change is supported by the federal government, but smaller phone and Internet service sellers say the two giants are trying to escape regulations that promote competition. If regulators approve, AT&T customers would eventually have to switch to wireless or high-speed service. New customers wouldn't be allowed to sign up for traditional, landline-based service at all.

AT&T's top executive in Alabama, Fred McCallum, wrote that the proposed changes are an "exciting opportunity for our customers and for our company." But Carbon Hill City Clerk Janice Pendley says some people in the former mining town are apprehensive. "Some of them like their landline, and they like it just the way it is," she says.

Nearly 40% of US households now have no landline phone, and there are more wireless devices than people. "Revolution is all around us," says Federal Communications Commission Chairman Thomas Wheeler. An all-Internet protocol network could lead to better products, lower prices and "massive benefits" for consumers, he says.

AT&T says no one will lose old-fashioned phone service until the carrier proves it can provide those customers with "an alternative." The revolution is about to get a nudge from the federal government. AT&T is seeking approval to launch a series of changes that would start with not letting new customers in Carbon Hill and a section of Delray Beach (FL) sign up for traditional, landline-based service. AT&T wants new and existing customers to eventually use broadband service, mobile phones or a conventional phone that connects to a router-like box.

In Carbon Hill, AT&T wants to go ahead even though the carrier is unsure how it would provide broadband service to about 4% of residential customers because they are too far away from the center of the sparsely populated area. In Delray Beach, there is a different challenge: About half of the people are at least 65 years old, the age group slowest to embrace new phones, according to the FCC.

Smaller phone and Internet service providers say it isn't fair for AT&T and Verizon to escape oversight by shifting to a different type of network. Those rivals depend on access to the giant carriers' networks -- and fear it could be threatened as chunks of the traditional phone network are shut down. That could lead to fewer phone and Internet-service choices -- and higher costs for businesses and consumers, the smaller companies say.

Cincinnati Bell said that it has agreed to sell its wireless spectrum licenses and other related assets to Verizon Wireless in a deal valued at $210 million.

Cincinnati Bell Wireless will sell all of its rights, titles and interest in its wireless spectrum licenses for $194 million in cash, while Verizon will take over certain tower lease obligations. CBW said it expects to continue to provide wireless service for eight to 12 months from the time of signing, and that customers don't need to take any action at this time.

"This transaction is an important step toward increasing focus on our growing strategic product base, wireless service and support throughout the transition period," said Ted Torbeck, president and chief executive of Cincinnati Bell, adding that it gives the company "increased flexibility" to meet growing customer demand for its suite of fiber-optic connection products.

CBW will lease back the spectrum it is selling for a period of time following the closing of the transaction, in order to wind down its wireless network operations and to help its wireless customers transition their service to Verizon Wireless or other wireless providers, the company said. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2014.

Turkey's telecom regulator signaled that it would stop blocking Twitter with government officials saying the microblogging site would soon be accessible two weeks after it was banned ahead of crucial elections.

Turkey's Telecommunications Board, or TIB, removed a court ruling from its website that had been used to justify the ban shortly after 5 p.m. local time. At 5:30 p.m., Twitter still couldn't be directly accessed, forcing users to continue seeking technical workarounds like virtual private networks. The TIB later said that the block on Twitter would be "lifted right after the necessary technical steps are taken."

The telecommunications watchdog's website still displayed court rulings blocking YouTube, in a sign that the video-sharing platform could be poised to remain inaccessible. Twitter didn't make an immediate comment on its @policy Twitter handle, but said in a tweet that it welcomed the court ruling. "We hope to have Twitter access restored in Turkey soon," the San Francisco-based company said.

Law-enforcement agencies are increasingly finding ways to unmask users of a popular Web browser designed to hide identities and allow individuals to exist online anonymously.

To keep their identities secret, users and administrators of a recently shuttered child-pornography website used a browser called Tor that obscures the source of Web traffic, authorities said in March. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations tracked many of them down anyway, largely because of mistakes that even some of the most sophisticated users eventually make. Tor and other programs designed to hide users' identity online have grown in popularity as people try to protect their privacy in an age of digital surveillance.

When paired with bitcoin or other virtual currencies that don't use the banking system, Tor can help hide the identities of people behind financial transactions. Such programs also have become a tool for those seeking to evade the law, including child-pornography traders, hackers and other criminals, creating challenges for law enforcement. But officials are becoming more confident that Tor's shield of anonymity isn't impenetrable.

"There's not a magic way to trace people [through Tor], so we typically capitalize on human error, looking for whatever clues people leave in their wake," said James Kilpatrick, one of the HSI agents who is part of Operation Round Table, a continuing investigation into a Tor-based child-pornography site that has so far resulted in 25 arrests and the identification of more than 250 victims, all children.

Apple and Samsung Electronics are squaring off in a new round of their long-running patent feud. This time, however, the docket might as well read Apple v. Google.

The trial, which starts in US District Court in San Jose (CA) on March 31, 2014, shows how the battle lines are drawn across the mobile-phone landscape.

Apple and Samsung are the biggest makers of smartphones and reap most of the industry's profits. But when it comes to software, the world is divided between Apple and Google, whose dominant operating systems give them control over the apps where smartphone users spend most of their time.

In this case, Apple is accusing Samsung of violating five of its software patents. Samsung contends that it licensed four of those features as part of Google's Android operating system, and that Google had been working on the technology before Apple filed its patents.

"Google will be a lot more front and center than in previous cases," said Michael Carrier, a patent expert and law professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "Google vs. Apple makes it more of a clash of the titans on the same turf."

Google has declined Turkish government requests to remove YouTube videos alleging government corruption, people familiar with the matter said, the latest sign of resistance to a crackdown against social media led by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Turkish authorities have asked Google to block the videos from YouTube's Turkish website, the people familiar with the matter said. But amid a national scandal over corruption allegations, Google refused to comply because it believes the requests to be legally invalid, the people added.

Google's refusal to remove videos raises the specter that Turkey could move to block access to YouTube within the country, after blocking the microblogging service Twitter. Both sites have been central conduits for allegations of corruption against Erdogan's government and faced public threats of a blackout by Erdogan. Some people within Google had feared a YouTube blackout could be imminent, after the Twitter takedown, the people familiar with the matter said. "We feel an immediate threat," one of the people said.