Techmeme: Game Over: Zynga Shuts Down PetVille And 10 Other Titles To Cut Costs (Josh Constine/TechCrunch)

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December 31, 2012, 1:15 PM

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Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

Game Over: Zynga Shuts Down PetVille And 10 Other Titles To Cut Costs — Executing the cost-reduction plan CEO Mark Pincus announced in November, Zynga has shut down, pulled from the app stores, or stopped accepting new players to 11 games, with some turning off today.

More: Digits, VentureBeat, PC Magazine, CNNMoney.com, Geek.com, GamePolitics blogs, Betabeat, GamesIndustry International, ValueWalk, SlashGear and destructoid

Tweets: @carnage4life, @adamdempsey and @brettwdiamond

Thanks:@ryanlawler

Jon Russell / The Next Web:

Samsung reportedly set to sell its first Tizen-based smartphone in 2013 — The world will finally see the fruits of Tizen, the open sourced mobile operating system that has support from Samsung, DoCoMo, Vodafone and others, in 2013, according to a report from Japan's Daily Yomiuri …

More: Daily Yomiuri Online, Engadget, Gizmodo, AllThingsD, BGR, LAPTOP Magazine, PC Magazine, CNET, TechCrunch, SlashGear, PhoneArena and Pocket-lint

Steve Stecklow / Reuters:

Exclusive: Huawei partner offered embargoed HP gear to Iran — (Reuters) - A major Iranian partner of Huawei Technologies offered to sell at least 1.3 million euros worth of embargoed Hewlett-Packard computer equipment to Iran's largest mobile-phone operator in late 2010, documents show.

More: PC Magazine, CNET, The Register, Gizmodo, ValueWalk, Hillicon Valley, SlashGear, AllThingsD, Electronista, TechCrunch and ZDNet

Nick Bilton / NYT Bits:

Disruptions: The Real Hazards of E-Devices on Planes — A pilot uses the FlySmart with Airbus app on an Apple iPad. The F.A.A. has no proof that electronic devices can harm a plane's avionics, but it still perpetuates such claims. — Over the last year, flying with phones and other devices has become increasingly dangerous.

More: Gawker, Guardian, avherald.com, Business Insider, The Verge, Gizmodo and Boing Boing

Tweets: @qthrul and @brianstelter

Keith Teare / TechCrunch:

Unnatural Acts And The Rise Of Mobile — Editor's note: Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of recently funded just.me. He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. — As all predatory, or formerly predatory, men and women know, if you're at a party and still …

More: Distribution Hacks and LAUNCH. Thanks:@stormbridges

Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:

Microsoft confirms zero-day bug in IE6, IE7 and IE8 — Second time in two years it's had to deal with late-December vulnerabilities — Microsoft on Saturday confirmed that Internet Explorer (IE) 6, 7 and 8 contain an unpatched bug — or “zero-day” vulnerability — that is being used by attackers to hijack victims' Windows computers.

More: Technet, The Hacker News, The Next Web, Ars Technica, Security Intelligence, ZDNet, Lifehacker, CNET, gHacks Technology News, The H Security, Softpedia News, WinBeta and Neowin

Sebastien Page / iDownloadBlog:

Hackulous shuts down: piracy app Installous is gone — In what seems like a small victory against app piracy, the Hackulous team announced today on its site that it is shutting down, bringing down its most popular apps in the process: Installous and AppSync.

More: TorrentFreak, PandoDaily, MacRumors, AppleInsider, The Verge, Gizmodo, DailyTech, MacNN, SlashGear, Macgasm, TechCrunch, Geek.com, everythingiCafe, App Advice, MobileBurn.com and Techie Buzz. Tweets: @idannyocean

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Microsoft offers up free month of Xbox Live following Cloud Saved Games outage — Microsoft says it will provide affected users with an automatic one-month extension to the company's Xbox Live gold service following an outage related to a Cloud Saved Games feature.

More: Xbox Live's Major Nelson, CNET, Kotaku, Neowin, SlashGear, WinBeta, Geek.com and Joystiq

Steve Lohr / New York Times:

Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition — IT was the bold title of a conference this month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and of a widely read article in The Harvard Business Review last October: “Big Data: The Management Revolution.”

Tweets: @howardlindzon, @edwardtufte and @rafat

Hunter Walk / Elapsed Time:

Trying to be the one true social graph is like trying to hold water in your fist — Facebook needed to buy Instagram because it was creating a mobile-first photo-centric social network. Snapchat is interesting to Facebook because it's creating a mobile-first ephemeral content social network.

More: Bijan Sabet, TechCrunch, Business Insider and Medium

Tweets: @davemcclure, @elizakern, @joshconstine and @joshm

Associated Press:

Obama Signs FISA Warrantless Wiretapping Program Extension Into Law … REACT: — FOLLOW: — Barack Obama , FISA, FISA, Barack Obama , Video, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Politics News, Warrantless Wiretapping, AP, Obama Fisa Warrantless Wiretapping, Obama Warrantless Wiretapping, privacy, wiretapping, Politics News

More: Hit & Run, The Verge and Hillicon Valley

Susan Crawford / Bloomberg:

U.S. Internet Users Pay More for Slower Service — Terry Huval is a large, friendly man with a lilting Southern accent who plays Cajun fiddle tunes in his spare time. He is also the director of utilities in Lafayette, Louisiana. “Our job is making sure we listen to our citizens,” he says.

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