Recent reporting by our partner The New York Times raised fresh concerns over the safety and well-being of the workers that staff Apple's supplier factories in China. Apple now says that it has requested an independent labor group to audit the conditions at its suppliers' factories, with the first inspections under way starting yesterday.

Millions of people love their iPhones, iPads, and refuse to be separated from their iPods. But lately our relationship with our Apple technology has been tainted by guilt after a story from our partner The New York Times revealed significant safety concerns for workers at some of Apple's overseas factories in China. Stories of long, abusive hours and horrifying conditions came to light. Now Apple is trying to allay concerns. The company has asked an independent labor group to audit the working conditions at its suppliers' factories.  

Today it's official. The social networking site Facebook filed to sell shares on the stock market. In its filing, the company said it was seeking to raise $5 billion and wants the ticker FB for its shares. But Facebook is aiming higher, hoping that the initial public offering could value the company to somewhere between $75 and $100 billion.

Twitter has announced that they will censor communication in some countries. This has sparked concern among users as the social media platform has become vital to pro-democracy movements around the world. How will this affect normal Twitter users? Which one of your tweets might be censored? Mark Gregory, technology correspondent for our partner the BBC, tells us more.

Google recently announced a new privacy policy that has users and privacy advocates up in arms. Effective March 1, this new policy will consolidate information from users' various products — from Gmail to YouTube to the Android mobile phone operating system — in order to "better tailor its services" for customers. But the move could potentially violate a users' privacy simply to better target advertising. Estimates say between 50-75 percent of the world's internet users utilize at least one of Google's products.

On Saturday, NASA will be launching the new rover "Curiosity," also known as Mars Science Laboratory. The mission is meant to examine chemical ingredients to see if the planet can support human life. The spacecraft will explore a crater the size of a large lake. Curiosity is delivering a rover equipped to test if there is methane in the air. This could be a key sign that the "Red Planet" may be able to support life.

Tumblr CEO David Karp and Maria Pallante, United States Copyright Office director, join The Takeaway for two very distinct views on the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill's stated purpose is to shut down websites that host or post pirated material and counterfeit goods. Hearings on bill began earlier this week in the House. Another version of the bill, called the PROTECT IP Act, already passed in the Senate.

Since August 31, the anniversary of Germany's invasion into Poland, Alwyn Collinson has been tweeting the events of World War II as if they were in real time, 72 years later. Under the handle @RealTimeWWII, Collinson sends up to 40 tweets a day chronicling the war, using eyewitness accounts, photographs and video. His Twitter page now has more than 118,000 followers and his tweets are translated into Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. Collinson talks about how he embarked on the six-year project.

It was a decade ago today that Apple's first iPod digital music player was released, forever changing the world's relationship to music. No longer would people on the move have to choose their favorite handful of CDs for their commute to work or trip to the gym. Entire record collections could suddenly be jammed into one's back pocket. The iPod would go on to be recognized as one of the crowning achievements of Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Charles Babbage, the 19th century British mathematician, philosopher, and engineer, has been called the "father of computing" for the powerful calculating machine he devised in the 1830s: the Babbage Analytical Engine. Babbage never built it, but now a team of British researchers at the Science Museum in London are combing through his blueprints to see if they can — and to see see if it works.  

Yesterday, we asked our listeners via text and on Facebook some questions about texting and driving: Critics say texting while driving is deadly. Oprah is asking people to sign a "No Phone Zone Pledge," a promise not to text while driving. Is it as dangerous as some people say? Can you offer a solution? Do you do it? Be honest!

We received a good number of responses, representing communities from Palm Beach Fla. to Tacoma, Wash., displaying a broad spectrum of opinion and behavior. So we put them into a map. 

Twitter and FourSquare were first introduced at South By Southwest Interactive and have taken off in the social media sphere. What's going to be the big new thing to come out of South By Southwest Interactive this year? The event kicked off on Friday, marking the start of a week-long conference for social media entrepreneurs and techies to introduce their products and make business deals. Over the past few years, SXSW has become the venue to unveil apps that and software that forever change the social media market. 

From cell phones to Facebook and Twitter to YouTube, the ubiquitous social technology that children and young adults have at their disposal make them both accessible and vulnerable in ways that we could have never imagined just a generation ago. The president and first lady Michelle Obama want to make Americans aware of the new and persistent threat that bullying poses to the our nation's children. Later today, the White House hosts a conference on the prevention of bullying and cyber-bullying. We know that technology is changing the ways that America's young are capable of bullying their peers, but are the ways in which people become participants also changing?

The dot com bubble of the 1990s was marked by a “growth-over-profits” mentality. During that period, Web entrepreneurs made “free-money” selling popular, but hugely over-valued dot coms in initial public offerings to people who either didn’t understand or didn’t care that these businesses were never going to turn an actual profit. Today, websites like Facebook, Twitter and Pandora are each valued in the billions (and tens of billions), and are expected to go public soon. Is history repeating itself; and if so, should we be worried about a second (or is it third?) dot com bubble?

A new study conducted by the National Institutes of Health links cell phone use with increased brain activity. Apparently less than one hour of exposure to an active cell phone can result in increased glucose production in brain regions closest to the phone’s antennae. Joining us to explain the findings is Lauren Emberson, cognitive neuroscientist and researcher at Brown University. 

Should a company that sells pornography turn it's back on helping host, or fund, Wikileaks? Where is the moral and legal line for companies that have been involved in the company? We're joined by Lauren Bloom, business ethics consultant, for her take. She says that it seems likely the companies aren't caving to government pressure, but are rather making savvy business decisions. 

You've got something you want taken offline: a drunken Facebook photo, an ill-advised blog post about your flirtation with Satanism, a frustrated tweet you wish you could take back. As Facebook passes its 500 millionth user, we take a look at new proposals to reduce the threat that we users of the internet pose to ourselves. 

We here at The Takeaway are always looking to connect with local communities. So this week we're hosting a summit with our friends at WLRN in Miami that's made possible by the Knight Foundation. We're experimenting to see how we can use text messaging as a tool for uncovering local issues that matter in Little Haiti, Miami. Can it help journalists and the communities they cover tell more compelling stories?

Last Friday, Lauren Mechling and Laura Moser began an unusual experiment. They published the first three chapters of their young adult vampire novel “My Darklyng” on slate.com. Every Friday for the rest of the summer, they’ll be publishing three more chapters.

Of course, for anyone familiar with the history of serialized novels, none of this is particularly newsworthy. But there is something unique about “My Darklyng” that could pave a new way for novels and technology to play off each other in the near future: Specifically, each character in the story has her own online life outside of the novel – including Facebook pages with photos, twitter feeds, Wikipedia entries, and videos posted on Youtube.

Across the country, a groundswell of public outrage continues to grow against oil giant BP as oil continues to leak into the Gulf of Mexico. That's despite the news that a cap is helping to collect between 10,000 and 20,000 gallons of oil a day. Some Twitter users, irritated at the situation, have vented their outrage to the Twitter user @BP.

Unfortunately, @BP is not that BP. It's the Twitter handle of Bryan Pendleton, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon who says a typical tweet is "'clean it up, followed by an expletive."