Techmeme
December 3, 2013, 3:10 PM

Top News

Ben Popper / The Verge:
UPS researching its own delivery drones to compete with Amazon's Prime Air  —  Flying parcel-carriers are the next logical frontier for delivery companies  —  Amazon made headlines Sunday night when it announced it was working on small drones that could someday deliver customers packages in half an hour or less.
Marcus Wohlsen / Wired:
Even if the Feds Let Them Fly, Amazon's Delivery Drones Are Still Nonsense  —  Amazon took over the 24-hour news cycle last night with the unveiling of Prime Air, an aerial drone that can fly Amazon packages straight to your front porch.  The world's largest online retailer duped 60 Minutes …
Stuart Dredge / Guardian:
Spotify opens up analytics in effort to prove its worth to doubting musicians  —  Streaming music firm opens Spotify Artists website and claims when it reaches 40m subscribers, even ‘niche indie albums’ will earn $17k a month  —  Streaming music service Spotify is hoping to win …
Gautham Nagesh / Wall Street Journal:
The Agency Running HealthCare.gov Mostly Kept to Itself as Warning Signs Grew About the Website  —  When warning signs emerged earlier this year, the agency running the HealthCare.gov website mostly kept the problems to itself—a decision that now looms large in explaining how the project went so badly astray.
Tweets: @stefaniei
Kevin C. Tofel / Gigaom:
Motorola apologizes for Moto X Cyber Monday snafus, extends deal  —  Claiming it wasn't ready for the high volume of orders on discounted Moto X handsets on Monday morning, Motorola apologized later that same evening for the hours of customer frustration.  A blog post from Motorola CEO Dennis …
Kit Chellel / Bloomberg:
Nokia Gets Ruling Blocking Sales of HTC's One Mini Phone in U.K.  —  A London judge said HTC Corp. (2498) couldn't sell its One Mini phone in the U.K. from Dec. 6 after it was found to have infringed patents owned by Nokia Oyj.  (NOK1V)  —  While Judge Richard Arnold also ruled that HTC's …
Agam Shah / PC World:
HP Slate tablets running Android Jellybean hit the market  —  Hewlett-Packard's latest Android tablets with multiple screen sizes are available through the company's website.  —  HP Slate 7 Extreme  —  The tablets run Android 4.2, code-named Jellybean, and are listed at the company's tablet page.
Jon Russell / The Next Web:
PayPal launches a digital gift store, featuring Apple as its sole launch partner  —  A week after adding support for prepaid gift cards, payments giant PayPal has launched its own digital gift store to allow US -based customers to buy gift cards for friends and family using its service.
Rob Wile / Business Insider:
Stockholm-based KnCMiner sells $8 million worth of bitcoin mining hardware in 24 hours  —  Bitcoin Developer Sells $8 Million Worth Of Hardware In 24 Hours, As Mining Technology Arms Race Goes Insane  —  Stockholm-based KnCMiner sold $8 million worth of their new $10,000-a-pop bitcoin miners …
Mikey Campbell / AppleInsider:
Future iPhones may unlock, hide messages based on a user's face  —  Apple on Tuesday was granted a patent that uses facial recognition technology to control a computing device, like an iPhone, iPad or Mac, allowing for a more secure and productive operating environment.  —  Source: USPTO
Jon Christian / Wired:
From ‘Preggers’ to ‘Pizzle’: Android's Bizarre List of Banned Words  —  There's no “sex” at the Googleplex.  —  Type or swipe the word on the latest version of Android's Google Keyboard — or for that matter “intercourse,” “coitus,” “screwing” or even “lovemaking” — and the web giant's predictive algorithm will offer no help.
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Scientist-developed malware covertly jumps air gaps using inaudible sound  —  Topology of a covert mesh network that connects air-gapped computers to the Internet.  —  Hanspach and Goetz  —  Computer scientists have developed a malware prototype that uses inaudible audio signals to communicate …
Derrick Harris / Gigaom:
Netflix is balancing its streaming traffic across Amazon's cloud  —  Netflix is fighting back outages in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform with a new architecture that has its streaming-video service running live across multiple regions of the AWS cloud and balancing user traffic between them.
More: SlashGear and GeekWire
Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch:
Apple Buys Topsy For Price Reportedly North Of $200M, Could Use Social Signals To Bolster Siri, App Store Relevance  —  Apple has purchased social analytics firm Topsy, which focuses on parsing data from Twitter, reports The Wall Street Journal.  The deal was apparently worth ‘more than $200M’ according to the publication.
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