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According to the U.S. industry watch dog Federal Trade Commission (FTC), popular YouTubers were paid up to $30,000 to promote the Xbox One as part of "a deceptive ad campaign."

The FTC says large online entertainment network Machinima was part of the 2013 marketing campaign that ended up generating millions of views for the video reviews about the console.

Unfortunately for Machinima and Microsoft, the videos did not have any disclaimers stating that Microsoft had paid for the reviews, and thus the videos fell under "deceptive advertising" per U.S. law.

"When people see a product touted online, they have a right to know whether they're looking at an authentic opinion or a paid marketing pitch," said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC's bureau of consumer protection.

Machinima has since settled the case and will state why all vloggers are backing a product moving forward. "Machinima is actively and deeply committed to ensuring transparency with all of its social influencer campaigns," said the company.

Both Microsoft and its ad agency, Starcom MediaVest, have policies in place to avoid such deceptive practices and confirmed to the FCC that the payments were "isolated incidents."

This week at IFA 2015, Chinese OEM Huawei introduced their new flagship, the Mate S, featuring the 'Force Touch' feature made popular by the Apple Watch.

Force Touch is a pressure-based touchscreen tech that allows you to do different interactions with the devices dependent on how powerfully you press the screen.

For the Mate S, force touch will also make the phone into a scale (for lighter items of course) and allow you to open apps or zoom using pressure.

The Mate S has a 5.5-inch AMOLED display, a fingerprint scanner, a Huawei Kirin 935 octa-core processor, 3GB RAM, 32GB storage, a 2700mAh battery and a pretty gorgeous thin metal frame.

Pre-orders begin soon for the device, which will be available in 30 countries (but not the U.S.) with a price starting at€649.

This week at the annual IFA event, Sony unveiled new Xperia smartphones including the flagship Xperia Z5 and its little brother, the Z5 Compact in addition to the new high-end Z5 Premium.

Most notable of the bunch is the Z5 Premium, which features a 5.5" 4K TRILUMINOS Display for mobile and IPS. The smartphone is powered by a Snapdragon 810 processor, 32GB internal storage and a large 3430 mAh battery. Sony notes that the microSD slot can support a 200GB card, giving you ample room for some 4K content.

The device supports quick charge, has built in DLNA and MHL 3.0 for porting the content to the big screen and Sony says the Premium will upscale everything you have to 4K without noticeable loss of detail.

Furthermore, the Premium also "features Sony's innovative memory on display feature – the data transfer between processor and device is optimized so Xperia Z5's display memory technology remembers the display of images seen on your smartphone and caches the image or video so that you don't need to reload the full image each time you view it – preserving battery power in the process."

The phones also promise the best camera yet, with a large 1/2.3 Exmor RS for mobile, a 23MP sensor and F2.0 G Lens with the fastest autofocus on the market.

Earlier this week, CBS Sports made headlines by announcing an expanded streaming schedule for their football broadcasts.

The company says it will stream NFL ON CBS game coverage including two regular season games, four playoff games and Super Bowl 50, all for free, even if you do not have a cable subscription.

CBS says the content will be available on "laptops, desktops and tablets at CBSSports.com and on televisions through select Connected TV devices, including Xbox One, Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku players and Roku TV models."

The first game to be streamed is Jets vs Dolphins on October 4th at 9:30AM. The game is being played in London and is expected to have a live crowd of 90,000 fans. Additionally, the Thanksgiving Panthers vs Cowboys game will also be streamed.

More importantly, "all AFC playoff coverage will again be streamed this year, including the Wild Card, Divisional, and Championship games." The Super Bowl, the most watched TV event of the year (every year), will also be streamed, a notable milestone.

"We're very excited to offer more NFL ON CBS streaming coverage across more digital platforms than ever before," said Jeffrey Gerttula, Senior Vice President and General Manager of CBS Sports Digital. "All NFL fans will have access through their computers, tablets and now Connected TVs to two regular season games for the first time in addition to all of the AFC playoff action, culminating with a truly historic Super Bowl."

Following last month's HQ renders released by famous leaker @Evleaks (Evan Blass), we now have real photos of BlackBerry's upcoming Android-powered slider phone.

If all the leaks are accurate, the phone will have a full BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard hidden under a sliding touchscreen, reminiscent of the most popular smartphones of yesteryear.

From what we can tell, the phone will have a large speaker grille right on the bottom of the handset, the device will have a microSD slot for expanded storage and a 16MP camera. Codenamed Venice, the device has been rumored to have a Snapdragon 808 processor, a 5.4-inch QHD display and 3GB RAM although those specs are unconfirmed.

Somewhat comically, the photo shows the BlackBerry having WhatsApp installed, rather than BlackBerry's popular BBM messenger service.

Universal Music Group, the largest of the record labels, reported an increase in revenue and profits for the 1H 2015, following nice growth in its streaming business.

Revenue grew to $2.6 billion, up 15.4 percent year-over-year, although fluctuating currencies did play a part in the increase, said Universal parent Vivendi. Net income was up to $255 million, up 11.5 percent year-over-year and once again thanks in part to currencies.

More notably was the major 34 percent increase in subscription and streaming services, which helped the company to "more than offset the decline in both digital download and physical sales," both of which have long peaked. The number would have also likely been a bit higher had the results included Apple Music, which was released on June 30th and will show up in the 2H 2015 results.

A judge has approved a $415 million settlement ending a lawsuit that had accused Apple, Intel, Adobe and Google of conspiring to keep salaries down and job mobility low.

Workers sued the tech giants in 2011, accusing the companies of colluding to not recruit one another's employees between the years of 2005 and 2009, keeping salaries lower than they would have been had the companies been actively looking to hire the skilled workers.

Judge Koh deemed the settlement to be appropriate and attorneys will get $40 million for their time on the case while thousands of workers will get a cut of the large settlement.

Emails from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and other high-level execs doomed the tech companies as it revealed plans for the companies to avoid 'cold calling' highly skilled engineers from the other companies, thus limiting their job mobility and salary opportunities.

Music discovery app Shazam had a great 2014, but its losses continue to accelerate as the company struggles to make profits.

Shazam had about 120 million monthly active users at the end of 2014, but the company lost £14.84m in 2014, up significantly from the £7.74m it lost in the previous year.

Revenue remained strong, at least, up 16 percent to £36.01m at the end of 2014.

The company has done two funding rounds since 2014, raising first $10 million USD and then $49 million USD, making Shazam a 'unicorn' - a startup with a $1 billion valuation. Like most unicorns, it does appear that Shazam is a ways away from making a profit.

Sony Pictures has reached a settlement with thousands of former employees whose social security numbers, medical records and other data were leaked as part of the massive cyber attack on the company last winter.

Since the hack, the company has seen seven lawsuits filed against it, and all are pending class-action certification if this settlement is not approved. Sony has since asked for 45 days to get the settlement approved before class-action certification can be awarded.

The hack, one of the largest in corporate history, saw attackers steal terabytes worth of data, including pre-release films and over one hundred thousand emails, some of which have been very damaging to the company. The studio's co-chairman Amy Pascal stepped down earlier this year after emails surfaced of her writing nasty comments about popular actors and directors, and even making racial comments against President Obama.

More recently, emails revealed that Sony's upcoming film 'Concussion' was cut and changed at the behest of Sony Pictures executives as to not anger the NFL. The movie is about neuropathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu, played by Will Smith, who discovered the terrible brain-damaging effects of football (and specifically concussions) on older football players and how it led to an increasing amount of suicides.

Earlier this week, Verizon updated its long-standing logo, modernizing the look and downplaying the giant check mark of the past logo.

While most agree the logo is a nice improvement, T-Mobile CEO John Legere has taken the opportunity to mock the logo and use it against Verizon and its practices.

Legere, who does not hold any punches, says Verizon 'screws over customers,' 'keeps all your unused data' and offers 'no early upgrade options.' Legere even trolled Verizon some more by asking Twitter users to add their own using the hashtag #NewVerizon.

T-Mobile, which recently became the 3rd largest carrier in the U.S., surpassing Sprint, has seen incredible growth since Legere came on board as the carrier has decidedly gone anti-establishment and started offering plenty of perks at great prices.

Over the past few months, e-book distributors have been signing new deals with e-commerce giant Amazon, and you've likely noticed that the prices of e-books have gone way up, almost in-line with what a physical book sells for.

While the publishers were likely happy that they got to price gouge (and Amazon could no longer discount), revenues have already taken a huge hit so the publishers' strategy has unsurprisingly backfired.

Majors Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers and Simon & Schuster all reported major declining e-book revenue in the last quarter. Hachette, for example, saw e-books fall to just 24 percent of its U.S. net revenue for the first 6 months of 2015, compared to 29 percent a year earlier. The company also had a large 7.8 percent drop in revenue for the period.

On the other hand, most of the publishers have claimed that lack of blockbuster titles have been the cause of declines but that remains to be seen.

After years of being banned from the nation, Google could be well on its way to having the Google Play Store return to China this fall.

According to a new report, the store could return, in a censored version, after Google removed its services from China in 2010 over surveillance and censorship concerns. Those concerns are not likely to have changed but what has certainly changed since 2010 is China's smartphone market base, which has exploded over 300 percent.

Google will reportedly use its close partners like Huawei to get back into the country, asking the major phone maker to include the Play Store with its Android phones sold in the nation. Even with a Chinese partner, the Play Store will require government approval, which almost certainly means a neutered offering that restricts popular apps like Twitter and Facebook. Google will also have to restrict what movies, books and music it sells in the nation, if it's even allowed to do so, at all.

Finally, the report claims that the Play Store will only work with Android Marshmallow devices, which means the launch will by tiny in the fall. The new operating system is expected to launch early next month alongside a new Huawei-built Nexus flagship.

According to a new report, Apple's upcoming September 9th event will be one of the biggest in the company's history.

In addition to showing off the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, the company will also unveil a brand new Apple TV set-top and new Apple Watch bands. But, if sources are correct, then the company will also launch the oft-rumored iPad Pro and even a new iPad Mini.

While most of those items were expected, the iPad Pro has been rumored for almost two years now and has never been more than just rumor. The iPad Pro will be a giant tablet, possibly 12.2-inches, that could launch as early as November. The tablet has been most recently rumored to have stereo speakers, run iOS 9.1 and support Force Touch.

Apple has not confirmed anything except to say that the event will include an "unprecedented" number of product launches, and indeed, the company has rented out an auditorium that fits 7000.

Whether you are an Apple fan or not, next week should be interesting at the least.

Microsoft Windows 10, on the market since the end of July, has now surpassed Apple's OS X Yosemite in market share.

According to the latest figures from Statista, the operating system has 5.2 percent market share, ahead of Yosemite at 4.8 percent. Although Mac has a much smaller share of the overall market, the number is still significant as Yosemite was launched last November.

As expected, Windows 7 is far and away the leader, at 57.7 percent share, followed by the 14-year old (wow) Windows XP at 12.1 percent. Windows 8.1, in its short time on the market, has 11.4 percent share and that share is expected to disappear in the coming months as Windows 10 cannibalizes it.

Windows 10 is free to legal owners of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 and the operating system is also available on different ecosystems including Raspberry Pi, tablets, Windows Phones and soon on the Xbox One.

(Chart via BI from Statista)

According to a new report, a few of the most popular web-connected baby monitors are extremely vulnerable to being attacked as they lack even the most basic security features.

Besides giving cyber attackers an in to watch your baby, it may also give access to other Wi-Fi enabled devices around the home.

Security firm Rapid7 Inc. reported on nine baby monitors that are popular and range from $55 to $260 in price. "There's a certain leap of faith you're taking with your child when you use one of these," says Mark Stanislav, a senior security consultant at Rapid7. All of the monitors record and send the video to your app or to a personal site (cloud). Some can even record audio and motion and alert the watcher.

The biggest problems found with the devices was lack of data encryption. Many of the monitors did not encrypt their data streams, or their web or mobile features were lacking strong encryption. Perhaps more scary was the fact that some has hidden passwords for access to the device, but those passwords were listed online or in manuals and were unchangeable by the user.

Of the nine researched, 8 of the monitors received an "F" rating while received a "D-," but all have been notified and some have already begun making changes. "When one gets an 'F' and one gets a 'D minus,' there isn't an appreciable difference," Stanislav says. "And unlike a laptop where you can install firewalls and antimalware, you can't do that here."