Techmeme: Brands may be paying celebrities for tweets, but who's paying Twitter? (Paul Sawers/The Next Web)

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January 29, 2012, 12:35 PM

Top News

Jennifer Granick / The Shout:

Megaupload: A Lot Less Guilty Than You Think — The recent Department of Justice decision to indict Megaupload for copyright infringement and related offenses raises some very thorny questions from a criminal law perspective. A few preliminaries: I'm responsible for the musings below …

Enigmax / TorrentFreak:

Mega Aftermath: Upheaval In Pirate Warez Land — Despite its “rogue site” status and various other warnings, when MegaUpload went down last week it still came as a shock. — But what came next was unprecedented, a dramatic reaction in cyberlocker land that took out vast libraries of digital content and capacity.

More: rc3.org

Julie Bosman / New York Times:

Barnes & Noble, Taking On Amazon in the Fight of Its Life — IN March 2009, an eternity ago in Silicon Valley, a small team of engineers here was in a big hurry to rethink the future of books. Not the paper-and-ink books that have been around since the days of Gutenberg …

More: Business Insider, Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check, The Verge and TechCrunch

Sebastian Anthony / ExtremeTech:

Firefox 12 will feature long-awaited New Tab Page and Home Tab — After a long gestation period, it now appears that Firefox 12 — which moves to the Aurora channel at the end of the month — will feature the long-awaited New Tab Page and Home Tab. The new tab page is very like Chrome's feature of the same name.

More: gHacks Technology News, MacStories, WebProNews, Engadget, MacGazette.net, Electronista and WinBeta

Mary Riddell / Telegraph:

Bill Gates: ‘I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed’ — People's plutocrat Bill Gates talks about friendly rivalry, and how to get bankers to part with their money. — Change the world: 'If you have a dream and it comes true, it's a very cool thing,' says Bill Gates

More: CNET, Pulse2, Neowin.net, Business Insider, Softpedia News, Slashdot, The Next Web, MacDailyNews, Redmond Pie, iDownloadBlog.com, Computerworld, Electronista, 9to5Mac, Network World and GeekWire

Jolie O'Dell / VentureBeat:

Pass the popcorn: Y Combinator startup caught stealing from 37signals — Here's some developer drama for your Saturday morning: Curebit, a Y Combinator startup that just closed a round of funding from Dave McClure's 500 Startups fund, has been caught red-handed stealing HTML code, images, and the like from 37signals.

More: PandoDaily, TechCrunch and TechCrunch

Tweets: @allangrant, @allangrant, @paulcarr, @dhh, @davemcclure, @dhh, @dhh and @davemcclure

Cade Metz / Wired Enterprise:

Google Reincarnates Dead Paper Mill as Data Center of Future — Google's Finland data center is the ultimate metaphor for the Internet Age (Photos: Google) — Joe Kava found himself on the southern coast of Finland, sending robotic cameras down an underground tunnel that stretched into the Baltic Sea.

Paul Sawers / The Next Web:

Brands may be paying celebrities for tweets, but who's paying Twitter? — It seems you can't even post a photo of yourself eating a chocolate bar on Twitter these days without kicking up a stink. — On Tuesday, Manchester United and (former?) England defender Rio Ferdinand …

More: New York Magazine and AdAge. See also Mediagazer

David Beren / TmoNews:

T-Mobile To Offer Additional Unlocked iPhone Support Beginning January 30th — Starting on January 30th, T-Mobile will “begin offering additional support to customers using an Apple iPhone on our network.” T-Mobile's added iPhone support will include “common procedures …

More: AppleTell, GadgeTell, MacGazette.net, The Verge, 9to5Mac, Techie Buzz, App Advice, SlashGear, Macgasm, iDownloadBlog.com, MacRumors, Gotta Be Mobile, iPhone, Electronista, iPhone Savior and iClarified

Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:

Someone Finally Makes “S**t Silicon Valley Says” — After an onslaught of “S**t [blank] Says” videos in my Facebook Newsfeed, I appealed to Twitter yesterday, surprised that the industry that invented YouTube hadn't weighed in on the phenomenon. — Little did I know that husband …

More: VentureBeat

Sarah Lacy / PandoDaily:

That Was Fast: Betaworks Returns All Capital... And Then Some — The New York tech scene has certainly received a lot of hype, but a lot of people are waiting for results that prove it's more than just that. Proof that New York is really a tech ecosystem that is here to stay, no matter what may happen to Foursquare and Gilt.

Michael Geist Blog:

The ACTA Fight Returns: What Is at Stake and What You Can Do — The reverberations from the SOPA fight continue to be felt in the U.S. (excellent analysis from Benkler and Downes) and elsewhere (mounting Canadian concern that Bill C-11 could be amended to adopt SOPA-like rules) …

More: Pulse2 and ReadWriteWeb

Electronic Frontier Foundation:

We Have Every Right to Be Furious About ACTA

More: VentureBeat, Forbes, Washington Post, BBC, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable!, PC Magazine, Policy Blog and ArcticStartup

Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:

Two Weeks In, Google Says “Search Plus Your World” Going Well, Critics Should Give It Time — Two weeks ago, Google launched Search Plus Your World. Since then, Google has faced strong criticisms that SPYW is making its search relevancy worse and favoring its Google+ social network too much.

More: Lead411 Blog, VentureBeat, PandoDaily and Business Insider. Tweets: @mattcutts

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