Techmeme: In an App Store full of free alternatives, it's over for paid-up-front apps (Marco Arment/Marco.org)

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September 28, 2013, 11:00 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: TechCrunch, New York Times, AllThingsD, Ars Technica, Gothamist, Quartz, The Verge, Gizmodo, Engadget, Gawker, Boing Boing, NPR and Mashable

Tweets: @jayrosen_nyu, @ioerror, @dannysullivan, @d_seaman, @rsingel, @cjchivers, @carr2n, @declanm, @xor, @csoghoian, @mikeisaac and @pierre

Wall Street Journal:

NSA Internet Spying Sparks Race to Create Offshore Havens for Data Privacy — Firms Tout ‘Email Made in Germany’ as More Secure; Brazil Wants Its Own Servers — Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and other American technology companies were put on the defensive when Edward Snowden's allegations …

More: Digits

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 and Boing Boing. Tweets: @dangillmor, @pierre and @ggreenwald

Kevin Poulsen / Wired:

Feds Targeted Snowden's Email Provider the Day After NSA Whistleblower Went Public

More: 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: New York Times, MobileSyrup.com, The Next Web, CrackBerry.com and iPhone in Canada Blog

Tweets: @stroughtonsmith, @amir, @amir, @stevesi, @mathewi, @cdixon, @levie, @stevesi, @iainmarlow, @amir, @amir and @metromorning

Marco Arment / Marco.org:

In an App Store full of free alternatives, it's over for paid-up-front apps — Underscore Price Dynamics — Every iOS developer needs to listen to _DavidSmith's most recent podcast episode, Real World Price Dynamics with Lauren Smith (it's just 22 minutes).

More: iMore. Tweets: @viticci and @eugenewei

Jason Calacanis / LinkedIn Today:

Jason Calacanis touts power of AngelList Syndicates, boasts that his own now exceeds $300k — The Great Venture Capital Rotation — A couple of years ago, I was chatting with a guy named Naval, who had a site called AngelList. He had a fiery passion for helping founders and an outsider's chip on his shoulder.

More: Hunter Walk. Tweets: @bryce, @rabois, @kyletibbitts, @cdixon, @hunterwalk, @stilenius, @nihalmehta, @tedr, @joshelman, @jess, @davemcclure, @semil, @jason, @davemcclure, @kittukolluri and @qthrul

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: AllThingsD, Mashable, ABC News, I4U News, WinBeta, iClarified, Softpedia News, GeekWire, Los Angeles Times, SiliconBeat and Datamation.com

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

Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:

JustFab's Checkout Tactics Are JustShady — This Hacker News complaint about JustFab scamming a user's girlfriend — which gets resubmitted whenever JustFab raises money — is a little off, because JustFab is not a scam in the traditional sense. — The company is, however, abusing a tricky UI …

More: Valleywag and Gawker

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, @benedictevans and @benchestnut

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, @monkbent and @orege. Thanks:@ryanfaas

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: ABI Research, AppleInsider, NBCNews, Electronista, Ubergizmo and WebProNews

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