Hurricane season is right around the corner and the Federal Communications Commission is studying a plan to deploy emergency phone equipment in the air. Using drone planes, weather balloons and blimps, the FCC wants to effectively create floating cell phone towers. That way people could call to get rescued, call to get help, aid workers could coordinate efforts. We look at the possibilities and the challenges.

LinkedIn is a popular site for people looking to make contacts, find a new job, or, apparently, steal millions of passwords. Over six million user passwords may have been stolen from the social networking site in a recent hack. If you don’t share password across websites, you’ll probably be fine — but most people use the same password for several sites because remembering a different one for each site is a pain in the neck, and those people need to change their password methods now.

A recent estimate says 30,000 electronic surveillance orders are issued each year in federal courts. And unless the orders lead to actual charges, the person being watched doesn’t know. You might think, well, I’m no criminal, they’re not watching me — but not so fast. We take a look at the legality of the whole situation. Plus, another edition of Tech Report Theater.

Big companies are showing off new technologies that go far beyond games at the annual E3 video game trade show this week in Los Angeles. That’s where Microsoft announced Smart Glass, an app that takes secondary content from your Xbox experience and gives you a kind of second screen into it. The Xbox, PlayStation and Wii are transforming from game player to home entertainment hub. Meanwhile, the games themselves want to turn gamers into subscribers.

In the upcoming version of Windows, Internet Explorer will have its “Do Not Track” feature turned on by default. Goodbye creepy ads that seem to follow you around — hello, more generic ads for great deals on car insurance? Advertisers are not amused. And the default does matter — the vast majority of people have no idea how to manipulate the privacy settings on their web browsers. Plus, your medical history on a handy-dandy sticker.

Technology can do a lot of things, but can it keep kids from skipping school? In San Antonio, they’re going to track children with the same microchips used for cattle, or boxes in a Wal-Mart warehouse: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). More than 6,000 students will be outfitted with RFID chips, as a pilot for a district-wide program. The district says it’ll be good for emergencies, but there are inevitable issues of privacy. Plus: Are you ready for some “backyard” neuroscience?

Botnets are series of computers that are infected without their owners knowing it. Those computers — possibly your computer — are then used to send spam, relay stolen data, all sorts of bad stuff. Corporate bigwigs met for a summit on botnets at the White House yesterday, trying to find a way to make sure computers aren’t infected with bad software.

Computer networks across the Middle East are engulfed in Flame. That’s Flame, singular not plural. Flame is a newly identified bit of malicious software used in an enormous attack on government computers in Iran, Israel and other Middle Eastern countries. Flame’s power, combined with fear of what else might be out there, could lead to panic by governments around the world.

How many minutes did you spend online yesterday? How many hours did you sleep last night? How much water have you had today, like, in ounces? Those and other quantifiable answers are at the heart of a movement known as The Quantified Self. It’s an online hub for people looking to add up their own numbers and figure out what to do with the totals. Also, in Tech Report Theater, we play with the app-based photo sharing service Instagram, recently purchased by Facebook for a billion dollars, and Facebook Camera, a new photo sharing app from Facebook.