Techmeme: Samsung GS4 launch: Tone-deaf and shockingly sexist (Molly Wood/CNET)

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March 16, 2013, 4:00 PM

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Mikey Campbell / AppleInsider:

Apple sued by THX for allegedly misusing patented speaker tech in iPhone, iPad and iMac — THX, the sound innovation company founded by George Lucas, filed suit against Apple in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Thursday, claiming that various models of the iPhone …

More: Bloomberg, VentureBeat, 9to5Mac, CNET, Electronista, Engadget, SlashGear, Patently Apple, T3 News, The Verge, App Advice and iDownloadBlog.com

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Foursquare Aims At A Moving Target As It Tries To Close Another Round Of Funding — This year's SXSWi did not herald the next Big Thing in tech, as some guessed it wouldn't, but it wasn't always this way. In 2010, a year when people were a bit more optimistic about the new new thing, Foursquare was the boss.

More: Skift. Tweets: @dens, @rabois, @alexia and @hunterwalk

TechCrunch:

Mailbox Cost Dropbox Around $100 Million — Disrupt alumnus Dropbox made the second in a series of super-savvy, super-early stage acquisitions today, picking up hyped-up email management app Mailbox in an acquisition that we're calling “DropMail.” — We had been hearing that Mailbox was raising money …

Brooke Crothers / CNET:

Retina iPad Mini later, new Nexus 7 sooner — DisplaySearch — Small tablets are moving to very-high-resolution displays, like larger 10-inch class tablets have done in the last year or so. — An iPad Mini with an upgraded display could appear later in the third quarter or fourth quarter …

More: iPhone in Canada Blog, iPhone Hacks, Tech Shout!, Phones Review, iDownloadBlog.com, PhoneArena, App Advice, MacRumors, AppleInsider and iClarified

Molly Wood / CNET:

Samsung GS4 launch: Tone-deaf and shockingly sexist — I don't get offended very often. But Samsung's long parade of '50s-era female stereotypes, in the midst of an entirely other long parade of bad stereotypes, just put me over the edge. Oh, they announced a phone? You'd barely know it.

Kim Zetter / Wired:

Federal Judge Finds National Security Letters Unconstitutional, Bans Them — Ultra-secret national security letters that come with a gag order on the recipient are an unconstitutional impingement on free speech, a federal judge ruled Friday. — U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered …

More: Electronic Frontier Foundation, New York Times, Engadget, The Register, VentureBeat, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, The Verge, Techdirt and Ars Technica

Tweets: @eff and @tolles

Kim-Mai Cutler / TechCrunch:

Facebook Brings Down The Hammer Again: Cuts Off MessageMe's Access To Its Social Graph — MessageMe, an app that launched last week and raced up the charts to the #2 spot in social networking in the U.S., is confronting Facebook's touchiness around access to its social graph.

More: TechHive, T3 News and The Verge

Tweets: @semil and @joshelman

Slate:

The Google Graveyard — It's hard to lose a loved one, especially if that loved one is a Google service. That's why we're opening the gates of the Google Graveyard, a virtual space for grieving. Buried in these hallowed grounds are some of Google's ill-fated services.

Tweets: @carnage4life

Nathan Hurst / Wired:

How the America Invents Act Will Change Patenting Forever — Photo: United States Patent and Trademark Office — On Saturday, around 18 months after President Obama signed it into law, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act will take effect. Ostensibly, the act is designed to bring U.S. patent law in line with the rest of the world.

More: The Next Web, Forbes, PhoneArena, AllThingsD and adafruit industries blog

Alex Wilhelm / The Next Web:

Matthew Keys' legal defense in face of hacking indictment: He was an undercover journalist — When Reuters now-suspended deputy social media editor Matthew Keys was indicted over allegedly helping members of Anonymous deface the LA Times, using credentials that he provided, it was a surprise.

More: The Huffington Post, Reuters, PC World, The Atlantic Wire, SFist, Gawker, L.A. NOW, Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Huffington Post. See also Mediagazer

Ken Yeung / The Next Web:

Uber black towncar drivers strike in San Francisco over compensation terms and treatment — A number of Uber drivers of their ‘Black Car’ service are striking this afternoon in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco. Those drivers participating have parked in front of Uber's headquarters.

More: Engadget, PC Magazine, AllThingsD, TechCrunch and The Verge

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

Google Acquires Web Application Server Talaria To Enhance Its Cloud Platform — Talaria, a company that was building a “new, dynamic web application server with a JIT-based runtime at its heart,” just announced that it has been acquired by Google. The Talaria team will become part of the Google Cloud Platform team.

More: Motley Fool, GantDaily.com and GigaOM

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