Techmeme @ 2:00 PM ET, September 28, 2013

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September 28, 2013, 2:00 PM

Top News

New York Times:

N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens — WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans' social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times …

More: Gizmodo, The Verge and Boing Boing

Tweets: @rsingel, @mikeisaac, @carr2n, @declanm and @xor

Mike Masnick / Techdirt:

Dianne Feinstein Accidentally Confirms That NSA Tapped The Internet Backbone — It's widely known that the NSA has taps connected to the various telco networks, thanks in large part to AT&T employee Mark Klein who blew the whistle on AT&T's secret NSA room in San Francisco.

More: Schneier on Security. Tweets: @dangillmor, @pierre and @ggreenwald

Kevin Poulsen / Wired:

Feds Targeted Snowden's Email Provider the Day After NSA Whistleblower Went Public — When on June 9 Edward Snowden stood up in Hong Kong and revealed himself to the world as an NSA whistleblower, the Justice Department wasted little time in targeting his email provider.

More: Wall Street Journal, The Verge and SlashGear. Tweets: @kpoulsen

Globe and Mail:

Inside the fall of BlackBerry: How the smartphone inventor failed to adapt — This investigative report reveals that: — Shortly after the release of the first iPhone, Verizon asked BlackBerry to create a touchscreen “iPhone killer.” But the result was a flop, so Verizon turned to Motorola and Google instead.

More: MobileSyrup.com, iPhone in Canada Blog and CrackBerry.com

Tweets: @metromorning, @mathewi, @stevesi, @stevesi and @cdixon

Nilay Patel / The Verge:

Exclusive video: Steve Ballmer's intense, tearful goodbye to Microsoft — Outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has always been a speaker and performer like no other — his absolute enthusiasm for his company is electric in person, turning ordinary corporate events into raw displays of emotion …

More: ABC News, WinBeta, I4U News, iClarified, Softpedia News, GeekWire, Los Angeles Times and SiliconBeat

Tweets: @rahulsood, @zseward, @markgurman, @tomwarren and @jbenton

Ryan Faas / CITEworld:

Apple's new licensing for apps gives it a huge enterprise advantage — One of the biggest iOS 7 advances for enterprise environments is Apple's new volume licensing model. The new model is a massive step forward and arguably is the most significant enterprise advance that Apple has made in iOS 7.

More: iMore. Tweets: @drbarnard, @orege and @monkbent. Thanks:@ryanfaas

Farhad Manjoo / Co.Design:

How Google Taught Itself Good Design — “I had just assumed that Google was hostile to designers,” says Matias Duarte one afternoon this summer. We're in a drab Google conference room at the Plex, and Duarte sports a red-and-yellow floral-print shirt, skinny khaki pants, and a pair of white sunglasses.

Tweets: @stevesi and @benchestnut

Phone Arena:

ABI Research: Android taking over the tablet market from iOS — According to ABI Research, there has been a change in the global tablet market. The Apple iPad, which has been credited with creating the tablet category with the launch of the OG version in 2010, has “passed the baton to the Android ecosystem …

More: NBCNews, ABI Research and WebProNews

Christina Farr / VentureBeat:

Palantir just raised a massive $196M, filing shows — Palantir investor Peter Thiel speaking to a roomful of interns at the San Francisco Exploratorium. — Shadowy data-mining startup Palantir closed over $196 million in funding, according to an SEC filing.

More: Computerworld, TechCrunch and Mercury News. Tweets: @startupljackson. Thanks:@chrissyfarr

Jeff John Roberts / GigaOM:

Apple to pay $40 to iPad 3G owners shut out of all-you-can-eat data plans — Apple and AT&T are set to resolve a long-running class action suit over the companies' decision in June, 2010 to end unlimited data plans for the iPad 3G tablet. — In a ruling issued this week in San Jose …

More: SlashGear, Phones Review, I4U News, Engadget, The Mac Observer, App Advice, Electronista, AppleInsider and MacRumors

Andrew Goldfarb / IGN:

Valve Announces Steam Controller — “A different kind of gamepad.” — Valve has announced Steam Controller, “a different kind of gamepad.” — The controller features two circular trackpads. As explained by Valve, “Driven by the player's thumbs, each one has a high-resolution trackpad as its base.

More: Tommy Refenes, Gamasutra, Wired, AnandTech, The Verge, The Next Web, Giant Bomb, DVICE, Steam Universe, TechSpot, ExtremeTech, TIME, Mashable, SlashGear, Polygon and Kotaku

Eric Pfeiffer / Yahoo! News:

Iranian President Rouhani takes to Twitter after phone chat with Obama — Describing his phone conversation with President Obama as “historic,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani took to Twitter on Friday with a series of a fascinating messages that stunned and encouraged many foreign policy observers.

David Nakamura / Post Politics:

White House: Yes, we noticed @HassanRouhani's Twitter feed

More: The Lede, The Atlantic Online, Mashable, New York Magazine and PandoDaily

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