Techmeme
October 19, 2012, 6:45 PM

Top News

Mike Rogoway / Oregonian:
Apple starts work on massive Prineville data center  —  Apple has begun work on the first, $68 million phase of its new Prineville data center, clearing and flattening land for the one of two, 338,000 square-foot buildings atop the bluff that overlooks town.  —  Each building is more than twice the size of a typical Costco store.
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook Officially Begins Shutting Down “Questions” Product, May Refocus On Search  —  It was no Quora.  Today Facebook finally confirmed it is retiring Questions, which originally launched in July 2010.  The Questions Dashboard and option to share a poll to the news feed are being removed.
Will Oremus / Slate:
Minnesota bans Coursera: State takes bold stand against free education  —  Honorable mentions go to New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission for driving out Uber's online taxi-hailing service and to automobile dealers' groups in four states for trying to have Tesla dealerships declared illegal.
Ina Fried / AllThingsD:
Facebook: We Weren't Moving Fast Enough in Mobile  —  One of Facebook's mottos is “Move Fast.”  Indeed, there are posters extolling that mind-set throughout the company's offices.  —  But when it comes to mobile, even Facebook wasn't moving fast enough.  That was the message on Friday from Facebook Mobile VP Vaughan Smith.
Sam Byford / The Verge:
New Samsung Chromebook also available with 3G for $329.99  —  We were under the impression that Google's new Samsung Chromebook would only be able to hook up to the internet via Wi-Fi, but it seems that something got lost in the announcement.  A 3G model will in fact be available …
Ilya Pozin / Forbes:
Is Pheed the New Twitter?  —  Miley Cyrus seems to think so.  As does Ashley Tisdale, David Guetta, Paris Hilton, Chris Brown, and thousands of others who have joined the site in a matter of days.  —  So what is Pheed?  —  In short, think of it as Twitter, with a business plan.
Fruzsina Eördögh / ReadWriteWeb:
YouTube Networks: An Inside Look At Their Unsavory Business Practices  —  Ray William Johnson, the world's most successful YouTuber, announced he is leaving his signed network Maker Studios earlier this week via video.  The news sent the YouTube-o-sphere abuzz with gossip as both Johnson …
Jessica E. Lessin / Wall Street Journal:
Thiel in Talks to Invest in Airbnb at $2.5B Valuation  —  Online room rental service Airbnb Inc. is in discussions with venture capitalist Peter Thiel about a roughly $150 million investment that would value the company at around $2.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
Emil Protalinski / The Next Web:
GitHub hit by DDoS attack second day in a row  —  GitHub is having one hell of a week, with four outages in five weekdays.  The social coding site is currently being hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the second one in two days.  The site's engineers are working on fixing the issue …
More: The H Security and Softpedia NewsTweets: @github
Andy Greenberg / Forbes:
iPhone Uber-Hacker Comex Is Out At Apple  —  Apple's brief experiment in employing one of the most brilliant hackers to ever vivisect its machines seems to be over.  —  On Thursday the legendary iPhone hacker Comex, who I identified last year as 20-year old Brown University student Nicholas Allegra …
Connor Simpson / The Atlantic Wire:
Watch Reddit's Biggest Troll Defend Himself  —  Michael Brutsch, a 49-year-old man who posted on Reddit under the name Violentacrez until Gawker's Adrian Chen outed him, went on Anderson Cooper 360 to defend himself on camera for the first time.  —  Brutsch's Reddit persona became famous …
Jenna Wortham / New York Times:
Airtime, a Pedigreed Start-Up, Is Struggling  —  It sounds like a recipe for success for a new start-up: Two famed entrepreneurs, tens of millions of dollars in the bank and endorsements from celebrities like Alicia Keys and Jim Carrey.  —  But Airtime, the much-hyped video chat site created …
Zack Whittaker / ZDNet:
Microsoft offers only one-year Surface warranty, despite EU law  —  Summary: Microsoft is offering only one-year warranty for the enterprise-favored Surface tablet, while EU law dictates it should be “at least two.”  Didn't Apple recently get stung for this kind of behavior?  —  Zack Whittaker
Dan Moren / Macworld:
iCloud: Sharing done wrong  —  Despite the prominent addition of sharing features in iOS 6 and Mountain Lion, the company's concept of “sharing” is actually a narrow one.  And in an increasingly interconnected era—when people are spending more and more time sharing words, images, files …
Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:
How Many Techies Does It Take to Reelect a President?  T4O Launches “Innovator Series” Videos for Obama.  —  A large group of tech luminaries — including LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, Path's Dave Morin, JLab's Judy Estrin, Dropbox's Drew Houston, Craigslist's Craig Newmark and Box's Aaron Levie …
More: Mashable!Thanks:@beet_tv
Alex Wilhelm / The Next Web:
Microsoft announces Office 365 University, bringing subscription-based productivity apps to students  —  This morning Microsoft announced Office 365 University.  Due in the first quarter of calendar 2013, the product offering is the Office 365 suite, tweaked for students, and priced so that anyone heading into school can afford it.

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