Hayley Tsukayama

The legal battle between Twitter and the US government ended April 7, after the Department of Homeland Security withdrew its demand that the tech company release information to identify an account holder whose tweets are critical of President Donald Trump on Twitter. The lawsuit threatened to become a major battle over free speech between Silicon Valley and Washington. But it was over almost before it began. The tech company had filed a lawsuit April 6 to protest the order, saying that it violated the user's First Amendment right to free expression. But Twitter dropped its suit the next day, saying in a court filing that "[because] the summons has now been withdrawn, Twitter voluntary dismisses without prejudice all claims."

We all know that the technology industry has a gender problem. But how do you move the needle from awareness to action? Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, and Girls Who Code, a nonprofit tech group have an idea: take the fight to the states.

On Feb 17, both will host the first-ever Girls Who Code Governor's Summit at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park (CA). The guest list includes Govs Mary Fallin (R-OK) and Gina Raimondo (D-RI) and Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa. Many organizations aimed at improving gender equality in the tech field have focused on changing the culture at tech companies in the past. But this is the first time an effort is aimed at the state level. “​What’s great about having these governors and state officials involved is that they set the educational agenda for their states,” Sandberg said. And, she said, reaching young kids — as Girls Who Code has done on a smaller scale — is key to improving tech's gender problems long-term.

Some visitors to the White House website have reported seeing messages that carry some scary warnings. A message from Google Chrome warns: “Attackers might be trying to steal your information from messages.whitehouse.gov, for example passwords, messages or credit cards.” Post staffers ran into similar messages on Microsoft's Edge browser, Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox browser. According to cybersecurity professionals, the messages don't seem to be prompted by an attack. In fact, the messages aren't obviously linked to anything nefarious at all; it’s likely due to a simple maintenance oversight.

Experts said that the messages are appearing because the site's security certificate — or, very simply put, the thing that verifies that a site is what it says it is — isn’t valid. It appears the White House’s equipment isn’t configured correctly, and the old certificate was revoked or allowed to expire without getting replaced, said Kenneth White of the Open Crypto Audit project, a nonprofit dedicated to improving cybersecurity. There are perhaps hundreds of pieces of equipment and servers that need to be just right to keep the White House site up and running correctly, so it’s easy to miss something, he said.

President Trump may have used the power of social media to make his way into the White House, but now social media networks are showing that muscle can work for his opposition, too. The real question, however, is whether this burgeoning new movement can avoid the fate of many so others kick-started by the power of social networks — only to find that it's much harder to make political change than to make a popular hashtag.

The very ability for movements to scale quickly is, in part, why they also can fall apart so quickly compared with traditional grass-roots campaigns. That highlights the crucial difference between old social campaigns and new ones. Scale, even in the form of a huge protest, does not equal success.

The debate about screen time is getting more complicated. As we spend more time each day in front of a screen, concern is growing over the effect it could be having on our brains — particularly the brains of our children. Parents may be silently scolding themselves for giving their kids too much screen time, but the issue is more complicated than simply logging on to computers and other devices.

The week of Oct 17, the American Association of Pediatrics announced new guidance on how parents should think about screen time for their children. And on Oct 24, parent advisory group Common Sense Media released an in-depth look at media use among black and Latino teens, an even more complicated picture of the merits and dangers of screen time. The group decided to commission the case studies after seeing the results of a census of teen media use the group ran in 2015. That report found that teens, on average, were using media in some form for nine hours each day. It also found that minority teens, particularly black and Latino teens, were spending significantly more time with media than their white contemporaries and the overall average. It would be easy to draw some simple conclusions from that result about how socioeconomic factors may affect media use, said Common Sense research head Michael Robb. But Common Sense wanted to see if it could paint a more complex and personal picture, rather than using such a broad brush. Young people in the study also used their phones for critical communication that brings them closer to their families.

Microsoft, getting a jump on the fall political season, took out full-page ads in the Outer Banks Sentinel, Martha's Vineyard Times and Rehoboth Beach's Cape Gazette to remind Washingtonians on vacation about e-mail privacy laws.

The ads are part of an ongoing campaign by Microsoft to convince lawmakers to reform the laws. Microsoft and other tech firms are also calling on Congress to debate these issues and settle the matter with legislation, rather than leaving it up to the courts to decide.

A kill switch allows a smartphone user to remotely wipe the contents of their phones and make them unusable in case they get stolen.

So what could change about your phone if it gets a kill switch? Possibly not that much.

In fact, many smartphone owners already have the capability. Between Apple and Samsung apps, at least 68 percent of US smartphones already have something akin to the "kill switch" capability.

And that number is only expected to grow: Google and Microsoft have also announced plans to put these kinds of features in their Android and Windows Phone systems. Doing so would essentially offer the option to all smartphone buyers, regardless of what state laws require.

Here are a few tips to choose the smartphone plan that's best for you.

Figure out your priorities: how much data do you really need?

Location, location, location: Consider how the coverage is in the area you're going to be using the phone the most.

Think about commitment: If you're not the kind of person who needs to get a new phone every year, you might prefer a contract plan in order to subsidize the price of your device.

Just adding a line? For families, the options get a little more interesting, because you'll be sharing pools of data and talk time among multiple lines.

Jumping ship: Keep an eye out for deals like these, particularly if you're unhappy with your current network, to get the most out of a new plan.

Here's how to make sense of what to do when an app requests access to a particular part of your phone:

Your microphone: Many people look at this app permission and stop immediately, assuming that downloading an app that accesses the microphone means giving a company like Google or Facebook the greenlight to eavesdrop on all of your conversations.

Your camera and photos: If you were nervous about having your microphone accessed, then you're probably even more concerned when you see a request to access your camera. But, again, there are reasons for an app such as Messenger to connect with your camera.

Your "phone status and identity": This is, admittedly, one of the creepier permissions that comes up on the permissions list, and one that can certainly set heads scratching. But this can just mean that the app in question needs to know when your phone is about to ring, so that your game doesn't keep going while you're chatting away.

Your contacts: Another permission that often catches people's attention is when apps ask for access to your contacts -- and, quite frankly, it should.

Your location: This is probably one of the most common permissions, and also one of the most personal pieces of information that you can grant to an app. If that makes you uncomfortable, then you can opt not to share your location data with that app, by heading to your location settings and disabling that function.

US Deputy Chief Technology Officer Nicole Wong, who focused on privacy and big data issues, is leaving the White House a little more than a year after joining the Obama Administration.