Your Facebook Pokes Are Stored For Two Days, Then Their Encryption Keys Are Deleted  —  Facebook Poke messages self-destruct after a few seconds, but is Facebook saving these potentially embarrassing photos and videos?  No. It's deleting them.  Pokes are encrypted, and Facebook deletes …

Hacker, Verizon duel over customer record claims  —  Verizon spokesperson Alberto Canal told ZDNet in an emailed statement: “We have examined the posted data and we have confirmed that it is not Verizon Wireless customer data.  Our systems have not been hacked.”

The New York Times Paywall Is Working Better Than Anyone Had Guessed  —  The New York Times instituted a paywall on its website last year, a controversial move that has yielded great results.  —  Ever since the New York Times rolled out its so-called paywall in March 2011, a perennial dispute has waged.

Google Chrome 25 will disable silent extension installation, kill all such extensions retroactively  —  Google on Friday announced that it is changing its stance for silently installing extensions in its browser.  As of Chrome 25, external extension deployment options on Windows will be disabled …

Intellectual Ventures: Don't Mind Our 2000 Shell Companies, That's Totally Normal  —  Back in 2010, we wrote about a report suggesting that Intellectual Ventures was using somewhere around 1000 shell companies to hide many of its patent shakedown attempts.  For years, IV itself liked …

Foxconn Buys Stake In Camera Maker GoPro, Turning Founder Into A Billionaire  —  Nicholas Woodman, avid surfer and GoPro founder, is now a billionaire.  (Photo courtesy of GoPro)  —  GoPro cameras have become the go-to item for filming extreme sports.  The small, high quality video cameras …

Amazon Is Ripe For Disruption  —  Amazon, the great disintermediator that put a spanner — in fact, a set of 25 spanners in a handy case, yours for just $9.99 — in the businesses of many a retailer, is going to face exactly the same fate if it doesn't start to address its weaknesses soon, particularly in the area of publishing.

Microsoft Releases Wordament, the First iPhone Game with Xbox Live Achievements  —  Microsoft has released a game tonight called Wordament for the iPhone.  The game has been a popular Windows Phone game, but is now also available on iOS.  Wordament was originally a side-project …