Sam Machkovech

What could help a body as large and overwhelmed as Congress get its tech facts straight? Rep Mark Takano (D-CA) focused his South By Southwest speaking time on one possible answer: a call to re-fund the Office of Technology Assessment, whose budget was nuked by the Newt Gingrinch-led Congress of 1995. Since the OTA's funding fallout, Takano says, members of Congress have found themselves without access to federally funded, tech-specific research on whatever the OTA deems relevant in terms of either current-tech expertise or trend forecasting. What's a representative to do, then?

Want to visit the United States in a non-immigrant capacity? Should the State Department get its way, your application to enter the country may soon hinge on coughing up five years of your online history. The Department of State's proposal would expand this request, which is currently required to apply for an immigrant visa.

Nielsen Soundscan released its annual mid-year US music sales report, and it touted the biggest musical movers and shakers of 2014 to date.

However, while the rest of the top-20 singles chart was full of million-plus selling songs, no other full-length album broke the million mark, and the total numbers compared to 2013 were drastically lower.

Total album sales, combining physical and digital numbers, were down 15 percent to 121 million, and while Nielsen didn't confirm how the album numbers split, the announcement of a 13 percent drop in digital singles sales was indicative that MP3s weren't picking up the sales slack. The digital-single drop of nearly 90 million sales, down to 593.6 million, also didn't see an equivalent boost in streaming numbers on services such as Spotify; those rose 42 percent to 70.3 million streams, but that was only a jump of 20 million.

The numbers didn't clarify whether streaming services saw any major jumps in subscription purchases in 2014, as well.

A sub-reddit dedicated to the video game Hearthstone exploded with discussion. A Finnish e-sports tournament had just been announced, and the Helsinki event, scheduled for July 31, would include a competition based on the Blizzard-produced card-battle game, complete with a grand prize of €1,000 and free travel to the tournament's world finals in November.

User Karuta posted the tourney's rules and highlighted a strange stipulation: only men need apply. As people dug in to the tournament's details, they found that the whole affair was divided into male- and female-only categories, and worse, women were invited to fewer competitions.

Public outcry came swiftly, and within less than a day, IeSF posted an update that hinted at a reversal of course. "Our top priority is to promote e-sports in the best ways we can," the company posted to its Facebook page. "We believe that listening is important, and we're now collecting your opinions from the social media, and we will update soon." That course has since been fully reversed.

With a promise of 50-60Mbps speeds, Sprint's new Spark network looks to maximize data performance while bringing HD Voice to tri-band smartphones like the Galaxy S4 and S5 and the HTC One M8.

So far, the Spark switch has been flipped in limited markets like Seattle, San Francisco, and New York.

In tests, Consumer Reports has confirmed that phones connected to Sprint's Spark network cannot access any over-the-air data services when in the middle of a phone call. That differs from many of the company's current 4G LTE smartphones, which come equipped with a separate LTE antenna that lets you send and receive data while using Sprint's CDMA network for voice calls.