Giant hacking conference Def Con just wrapped up in Las Vegas. The purpose of Def Con? One stated motto is “Hack everything.” And one of the world’s first and most ambitious massively multiplayer online computer games is getting a giant makeover. Sony’s EverQuest Next is a re launch of the game EverQuest that first started way back in 1999 and is still going.

The Edward Snowden affair has shined a spotlight on the relationship between Silicon Valley and the federal government. For decades that relationship has been beneficial to both parties, leading to innovation in both the public and private sectors. But these days, things are getting pretty complicated. And activist investor Carl Icahn has sued Dell and its board to force a shareholder vote by today. Icahn wants that vote to fail.

The U.S. International Trade Commission gets ready to hand down a big decision in the patent war between Apple and Samsung. It’s about tablets and whether Samsung copied Apple’s iPad. And July and August are two of the biggest travel months of the year, with a lot of families spending quality time together. So what do you do when someone has their face buried in a gadget the whole time?

The debate about high speed Internet access and service grows more heated all the time. Susan Crawford, fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, argues big companies are over-charging and under-serving us, and that it’s up to the government to step in and regulate a better way. She’s even got a book on the topic. The reviews of that book on Amazon.com offered a new and strange chapter in the debate this week. And Dutch and English researchers found that Hondas, Volkswagons and Fiats have a technical problem that could lead to easy car thefts. But thanks to a court ruling in England, their research may never be presented to the public.  

You may have seen TV ads talking about the Internet of everything — a network of smart devices, from your car to your kitchen, that you can easily control or even program. Turn down the AC at home from your desk at work, for instance. But as the web of Internet-connected devices expands, so do the security risks.

Two of the country’s biggest hacking conferences get underway in Las Vegas this week. Black Hat and Defcon. The biggest difference between the two? This year organizers at Defcon officially disinvited Feds from showing up in the wake of NSA leaks, while Black Hat’s keynote speaker will be none other than NSA Director General Keith Alexander. And Google changed Gmail last week — where once there was one true inbox, now there seem to be three.

Today it’s Samsung’s turn to tell the world just how it did last quarter. The South Korean tech giant has become a successful competitor to Apple, selling tons of tablets, phones and more. But like Apple, its recent success means an ever higher bar of expectation, from profits to innovation. And yesterday Facebook’s stock was up on good earnings news, but another Facebook story from this week caught our eye. It’s about the developing world, where Facebook wants to be the portal for mobile users connecting to the Internet without a smartphone.

A group of Google engineers inadvertently takes down a ring of car thieves in China. And any kid who loves playing with remote controlled drones now has a vocation to shoot for: deep sea explorer. The company Odyssey Marine Exploration has pulled 61 tons of silver bars off a cargo ship sunk by Nazis in 1941. Drones helped haul the silver up from the SS Gairsoppa which was three miles underwater off the coast of Ireland.

Apple has released its latest business results and they are better than many analysts expected. And, there are two sides to the Internet: the mainstream and the underground. What happens when the underground gets gobbled up by the mainstream? For one thing, it means online pornography gets pushed further to the margins of the web.