A rare defense of venture capital classic  —  One of our most popular stories this week was about the future of venture capital.  It traced the asset class's history from its boutique roots to the age of mega-brands to the rage around international expansion and into the last few years of microVCs, super angels, and accelerators.

U.S. spy agencies mounted 231 offensive cyber-operations in 2011, documents show  —  U.S. intelligence services carried out 231 offensive cyber-operations in 2011, the leading edge of a clandestine campaign that embraces the Internet as a theater of spying, sabotage and war …

Compliance vs. Complicity … There's an old saying that it's far better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.  I've seen the many, many statements by Google, Microsoft and everyone else about how they really want to tell everyone just how bad these government demands for information are …

Motorola X will drop to $99 on plan and gain at least 4 wood-grained backs in Q4  —  According to @evleaks, Motorola's Moto X phone will drop to $99.99 on a two year plan in Quarter 4 (which starts at the end of September).  In addition, those wood grain backs will make an appearance and cost an extra $50 …

Scoop: Google acquired WIMM Labs to bolster its own smartwatch plans  —  Watch out, Samsung: Google has some smartwatch development projects of its own, and it quietly snapped up Los Altos, Calif.-based WIMM Labs last year to kickstart these efforts.  WIMM Labs not only gives Google the talent …

Doctape Launches Standalone File Viewer App For iOS With Support For 80+ File Types  —  German cloud storage and file management startup doctape has launched a new standalone iOS app aimed at making it easier for iPhone and iPad users to view file types not supported natively by iOS.

Syria's Other Army: How the Hackers Wage War  —  At 5:41 P.M. on Tuesday, a tweet from the account of the hacker collective known as the Syrian Electronic Army, which supports the regime of Syria's President, Bashar al-Assad, said, “Media is going down...” It had been a couple of hours since …

HTC's exiting designers interrogated for expense fraud and stealing trade secrets (updated)  —  Earlier today, several top designers at HTC were arrested in Taipei under suspicion of fraudulent expense claims, as well as stealing trade secrets ahead of leaving the company to run …

Microsoft and ValueAct Capital sign cooperation agreement  —  Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has signed a cooperation agreement with ValueAct Capital, a San Francisco-based investment firm with $12 billion in assets under management that beneficially owns approximately .8 percent …