A Japanese court on Monday jailed a man for two years for making guns with a 3D printer in what is believed to be a first in a nation with strict gun controls.

Yoshitomo Imura, 28, was found guilty of making two guns at his home and publishing a video online detailing the process, said the Yokohama District Court.

Snapchat on Friday said it will begin weaving ads into the popular service for sending ephemeral smartphone messages, but promised not to be "rude" to its members.

The first Snapchat ad were to appear in the United States this weekend in a section of the service devoted to "recent updates," the Los Angeles-based startup said in a blog post.

The anonymous messaging app Whisper has lashed out at the Guardian newspaper, denying allegations that it secretly tracked users and shared data with the U.S. government.

"A pack of vicious lies," was the first Twitter response by Whisper's Neetzan Zimmerman late Thursday to the Guardian article, which maintained, among other things, that Whisper was tracking users even when they opted out of geolocation.

Twitter said Friday it would start reconfiguring users' timelines with "relevant" messages from people they haven't bothered to follow at the service.

Based on a positive response from its tests, the popular one-to-many messaging service is inching toward the Facebook model of using software to "curate" what users see based on their interests or activities, Twitter said in a blog post.

Apple's skinnier iPads and flashy big-screen iMac are sleek and stunning. But the tech giant is making a bigger strategic bet with next week's launch of Apple Pay — the mobile pay service aimed at turning your iPhone into your wallet.

The service, which goes live Monday and has hundreds of banks on board, is "hugely important" says Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett. It puts Apple in the middle of a wide range of consumer transactions, underscoring Apple's value as a brand and giving people a powerful new reason to buy iPhones, iPads and other gadgets.

Apple unveiled a thinner iPad Thursday with a faster processor and a better camera as it tries to drive excitement for tablets amid slowing demand. The company also released an update to its Mac operating system and introduced a high-resolution iMac model that might appeal to heavy watchers of television over the Internet.

The new iPad Air 2, at a quarter of an inch "thin," also adds many of the features previously available on iPhones. That includes the ability to take burst shots and slow-motion video, and unlock the device with a fingerprint ID sensor instead of a passcode.

If you've upgraded your iPhone or iPad to iOS 8, the new software update for Mac computers will seem familiar.

The Yosemite update to Apple's OS X system, available as a free download starting Thursday, adds several features to bring the Mac in line with last month's iOS 8 update for mobile devices. There's also new functionality to make Macs act more like iPhones.

Twitter on Thursday began letting people instantly listen to music and other audio by clicking on tweets from the popular messaging service.

The new Twitter Audio Card feature, launched in partnerships with SoundCloud and Apple's iTunes store, will allow users to stream audio live from the Twitter app.

Cybercrime costs are escalating for U.S. companies and attacks are becoming more complicated to resolve, a study showed Wednesday.

A survey of 59 U.S. firms by the Ponemon Institute with Hewlett-Packard found the average annual cost of responding to cyber attacks was $12.7 million, up 96 percent over the previous five years.

Netflix shares plunged Wednesday after its quarterly report showing disappointing subscriber growth for the streaming video group which has been expanding globally.

Shares in Netflix sank around 25 percent in after-hours trade after the California group said it gained just three million members in the past quarter, to boost its subscribers to 53.1 million worldwide.