Popular South Korean messaging app Kakao Talk said Monday it will stop fully cooperating with authorities seeking to access private messages as part of a government crackdown on online criticism.

Lee Sirgoo, CEO at DaumKakao which owns Kakao Talk, apologized for its initial handling of privacy issues at a news conference called at short notice by the company.

Over the telephone, in jail and online, a new digital bounty is being harvested: the human voice.

Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track criminals and replace passwords.

Southeast Asia's notorious taxi market is undergoing a shakeout as Uber and homegrown mobile booking applications gain popularity in a region that has long endured inefficient cartels and price-gouging drivers.  

San Francisco-based Uber, which allows customers to hail taxis or private vehicles via smartphones and pay with a credit card, is expanding rapidly in the region while fending off legal and regulatory challenges in various markets across the world.

Google is being swamped with demands from Europeans trying to erase humiliating links to their past from the world's dominant Internet search engine.

Nearly 145,000 requests have been made in the European Union and four other countries by people looking to polish their online reputations, according to numbers the company released Friday. That's an average of more than 1,000 requests a day since late May, when Google began accepting submissions in order to comply with a European court that ruled some embarrassing information about people's lives can be scrubbed from search results.

A huge trove of evidently intercepted Snapchat images and videos were exposed online Friday, raising fears about what may be revealed in messages intended to vanish seconds after beng viewed.

In what was being referred to as "The Snappening," people who used a third-party program instead of the official Snapchat application had copies of supposedly transient missives squirreled away by hackers who began posting them online late Thursday.

Audio technology veteran Bose Corporation and Beats Electronics on Friday called a ceasefire in a lawsuit over patented technology for canceling noise in earphones.

Lawyers for the companies asked a federal judge to dismiss the Bose lawsuit, saying the companies had settled their differences, without elaborating.

A supplier enlisted to make sapphire screens for Apple mobile devices on Friday urged a bankruptcy court to free it from contracts it branded "oppressive and burdensome."

Sapphire touch screens are a very tough synthetic replacement for the glass currently used on many Apple mobile devices, and are already used in a limited way for particularly sensitive parts of devices.

Electric car giant Tesla on Thursday unveiled a new two-engine vehicle designed to perform in bad weather, featuring four-wheel drive and anti-collision technology.

Performance in inclement conditions was considered one of the weak spots of Tesla's existing models and with the new car, the company is trying to win over drivers in regions where the weather is not the nearly year-round sunshine that its California base enjoys.

Industry tracker eMarketer on Thursday said that use of smartphones as wallets will jump in the U.S. next year, but shoppers won't be quick to abandon cash or credit cards.

"The more things change in the U.S. mobile payments space, the more they seem to stay the same -- at least in the short term," eMarketer analyst Bryan Yeager said in a release.

China's top court is putting pressure on Internet service providers to provide the personal details of Web users suspected of "rights violations", state media said Friday.

The move by the Supreme People's Court, outlined in a judicial guideline issued Thursday, is the latest effort by the Communist Party to exert control over China's popular online social networks.