PayPal and Google see a future where you go into a store and use your smartphone to pay. These are called electronic wallets and recently Mastercard, wary of the competition, said it will start charging a controversial extra fee to some companies that want to run Mastercard transactions through their e-wallets. But the card company isn’t stopping there. Mastercard’s Ed McLaughlin says his company has a wallet of its own.

South Korea is still recovering from an apparent cyberattack on Wednesday that shut down many cash machines, froze debit card transactions, and caused computers to go dark at banks and broadcasting companies. Power and transportation systems were not directly affected.  South Korean officials suspect North Korea but proving that will be difficult. Last week, North Korea had accused the South of getting into its computers. Is this the new norm?

When you send a text message or an email, should your Internet or phone company hang onto them in case the police ever want to take a look? That is the discussion on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers look into overhauling the federal law that covers when the authorities can get access to electronic communications and when they can’t. And software company Oracle is trying to move to the cloud.

A company called Roku makes a little box. In goes the Internet, out comes loads of TV channels when you connect it to a screen. Something like this could terrify a cable company like Time Warner. But what’s journalism without ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ stories? There’s word Time Warner is going to show up on Roku boxes, so its paying customers can watch TV on any screen connected to the little Roku instead of a clunky set top box. Is this the future of television?

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin has discovered a way to make desalination 100 times more efficient. And that could have a big impact on bringing clean drinking water to the developing world. The process is called reverse osmosis, and the material used is graphene — a lot like the stuff you smudge across paper with your pencil. The new material could make for smaller, cheaper plants that turn salt water into drinking water, but it could also have uses in warzones. 

Google says it’s doing what it calls ‘spring cleaning’ and sending Google Reader out to the landfill on July 1. Netflix has a new system that lets customers connect to Facebook, so their friends can see what they’re watching. And where is the economic center of the earth?

Samsung is set to release its latest iPhone challenger tonight — the Galaxy S4. Is the Korean company starting to challenge Apple’s coolness? And, as the Interactive session of South by Southwest in Austin now gives way to the film and music folks, a lesson from the festival on shifting digital media to silliness, and to silliness plus real journalism. Jonah Peretti is founder and CEO of the popular online media website Buzzfeed. He says the change is part of the website’s natural evolution, along with the social web itself. 

South By Southwest might be a festival of rock, movie, and technology stars. But Austin, Texas also had a visit from a politician who wants to be a tech star. It’s the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker, who was at a hack-a-thon put together by some of Lady Gaga’s social media people. Why was Booker in Austin? To launch a start-up, of course. 

Forget about Al Gore for a second: Tim Berners-Lee actually made the Internet. And the guy who created the World Wide Web has some strong feelings about his legacy. We talked to this computer scientist (who happens to be a knight as well) about a variety of tech topics. Also, SXSW Interactive offers up an Aaron Swartz memorial, and a new hot gadget: Leap Motion’s gesture control device.