Hacker, Verizon duel over customer record claims  —  Summary: A hacker said he has acquired more than 3 million Verizon customer records — but leaks only 10 percent of them, after the phone and broadband giant fails to fix a security flaw.  Verizon disagrees.  —  Follow @ZDNetCharlie Follow @zackwhittaker

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 …

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 …

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.

Pirate Bay Censorship Backfires as New Proxies Bloom  —  As reported earlier, the UK Pirate Party has taken the difficult decision to shut down their Pirate Bay proxy service.  —  Music industry group BPI threatened legal action against six members of the party, who would each have to risk bankruptcy to fight for their ideals.

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 …

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 …

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.