Put the Snapchat co-founders on suicide watch: Facebook is buying WhatsApp, a smartphone messaging service that's enormously popular around the world, for $16 billion, plus $3 billion in restricted stock units for employees, making it one of the biggest tech deals in history.

You can't crown yourself the voice of this generation without a little tech cred. Why else has Lena Dunham been popping up around Silicon Valley this week?

Yesterday, we called the coalition behind "The Day We Fight Back," an initiative protesting mass surveillance, to find out why NSA-friendly tech giants had not signed up alongside Reddit, Tumblr, and other companies for today's event. Just wait, they said.

For more than five months, between August 22, 2013 and February 4, 2014, your private Instagram photos were vulnerable to hackers, according to the security researcher who let Facebook know.

Facebook turned 10 yesterday, which means that if Mark Zuckerberg were still a middle-finger-swinging youth, he'd just be getting over his hangover. Instead, he's a perfectly groomed corporate overlord. Here's our tribute to Zuck when he was still fun—and wasted.

This morning, the world woke up to two "humbled" letters from two chief executives: Satya Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg. But you didn't need to read their words that closely because the CEOs proceeded to repeat them—almost verbatim—on camera not long after.

The boy king of NASDAQ has earned $3.4 billion dollars for himself this year alone, Bloomberg, reports, owing mostly to Facebook buoyant stock prices.. It's barely February.

Facebook has brokered a Superbowl deal with a short list of semi-famous athletes, one CNN anchor, and Fergie's husband. If these stars use Facebook to share a specific kind and number of posts during the big game, the company promises "amplified distribution" and "exposure to new FB fans."

Chris Poole, the founder of 4Chan can hardly believe that Facebook—"the standard bearer for what most people think of as 'online identity'"—would allow its users to be anonymous. Does the fact that you have to use a Facebook log-in for its new app Paper make it more believable?

On the occasion of Facebook's 10th birthday, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Businessweek to reflect on what the magazine generously calls the company's pubescent period. (Please. A decade in social network years makes Facebook more like 45-years-old.)

Remember when Facebook was a social network? Well according to 53 percent of its revenue, it's now a mobile advertising company. Damn, this quote just gets better with age: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

The lines have gotten even blurrier since the Internet kneecapped newspapers. In the past few years, media companies called themselves tech companies, then that distinction became meaningless. In between, tech honchos spent their loose change on magazines and newspapers or just financed their own.

Last week, two Princeton researchers used an epidemiological model to predict that Facebook will soon lose 80 percent of its peak user base. Slate called the methods "fatally flawed" and everyone forgot about it until Facebook decided to be a total spazz.

This is why we can't innovate nice things. Image via the Facebook profile of Sam Lessin, the social network's director of product management.

Thanks to Facebook stock closing higher than ever, Bloomberg reports the company's COO is now one of the youngest female billionaires on the planet.

The day after an uncomfortable internal leak out of Google, anti-gentrification activists in San Francisco are attempting to shut down private shuttles from Facebook and Google, the old fashioned way.

If you're wondering why there's been little news out of Twitter-based discussion... thing Branch, here's some: Facebook is acquiring the tiny talented team for $15 million, to create a project group in New York.

When life gives you death threats from teenagers, you make yourself a media resurrection. Enter this heart-warming tale of Mark Zuckerberg, a humble billionaire who learned to stop worrying and love that his stock price depended on revenue from mobile advertising.

The best laid schemes of Facebook cofounders often go awry. Chris Hughes had hoped a $2 million home in largely working class Ulster County—not to mention his facility with those game-changing ways of social media—would help his husband Sean Eldridge win a Congressional seat. But according to Eldridge's fundraising emails, the latest attempt to capitalize on his campaign's "incredible momentum" has garnered fewer than 150 online donations in three days.

Yesterday, during a Senate commerce committee meeting about data brokers—which make $156 billion tracking and selling your personal information—Senator Jay Rockefeller released the damning results of a year-long investigation. "I think it's a dark underside of American life, in which people make a lot of money and cause people to suffer even more."