Techmeme: The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry: An Oral History (Businessweek)

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December 8, 2013, 11:00 AM

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Janet Reitman / Rolling Stone:

Snowden and Greenwald: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets — How two alienated, angry geeks broke the story of the year — Early one morning last December, Glenn Greenwald opened his laptop, scanned through his e-mail, and made a decision that almost cost him the story of his life.

Tweets: @thomas_drake1, @justinraimondo and @jaredbkeller

Tim Worstall / Forbes:

German Patent Ruling Threatens Microsoft's Windows Phone Earnings From Android — In yet another round of the patent fights going on over smart phones we find that Microsoft has just been dealt a blow over the revenues it gains from Android hand sets. Yes, read that again …

More: FOSS Patents and Softpedia News. Tweets: @nileshk

USA Today:

Local police get metadata dumps from cellular providers, spoof towers using Stingray devices — Cellphone data spying: It's not just the NSA — LAW ENFORCEMENT USING METHODS FROM NSA PLAYBOOK — Local police are increasingly able to scoop up large amounts of cellphone data using new technologies …

Tweets: @mattblaze and @csoghoian

Julie Bort / Business Insider:

The Sad Story Behind Yahoo's Latest Startup Acquisition: Ptch — On Wednesday we reported that Yahoo acquired a mobile app called Ptch and will shut it down in a month. — Business Insider has since learned from multiple sources that Yahoo paid $6.5 million for Ptch.

More: TechCrunch. Tweets: @stevekovach, @jyarow and @karaswisher. See also Mediagazer

Businessweek:

The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry: An Oral History — In 1984, Mike Lazaridis, an engineering student at the University of Waterloo, and Douglas Fregin, an engineering student at the University of Windsor, founded an electronics and computer science consulting company called Research In Motion, or RIM.

More: The Verge, Globe and Mail, The Huffington Post, CrackBerry.com, MobileSyrup.com, Daring Fireball, PhoneArena, BGR, Yahoo! News, Ubergizmo, HBR.org, AppleInsider, The Verge, PandoDaily, DisplayBlog, Mobile Marketing Watch and Financial Post. Tweets: @ritholtz

Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:

Verizon Is Acquiring Content Delivery Network EdgeCast For More Than $350 Million — Verizon is looking to get deeper into the content delivery business with the acquisition of Los Angeles-based CDN provider EdgeCast Networks, TechCrunch has heard. Owning EdgeCast, and combining …

Washington Post:

FBI's search for ‘Mo,’ suspect in bomb threats, highlights use of malware for surveillance — The man who called himself “Mo” had dark hair, a foreign accent and — if the pictures he e-mailed to federal investigators could be believed — an Iranian military uniform.

More: Mashable, Gizmodo, SlashGear, Digital Trends, T3 News, Softpedia News and Ars Technica

Tweets: @arawnsley and @csoghoian

Daniel Cawrey / CoinDesk:

Baidu and China Telecom Stop Accepting Bitcoin, Price Slumps Again — The bitcoin price has continued to drop overnight on major bitcoin exchanges. The price on exchanges included in the Bitcoin Price Index all currently sit below $700, with the BPI overall having dropped almost 20% …

More: Los Angeles Times, Bitcoin Magazine, SlashGear, AllThingsD, Business Insider, The Huffington Post, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Forbes and MoneyBeat

Christopher S. Stewart / Wall Street Journal:

Inside the Effort to Kill a Web Fraud ‘Botnet’ — Working With Law Enforcement, Team Cuts Off Servers for Zombie Computers — For months, investigators at Microsoft Corp. hunkered down in front of their computer monitors, patiently stalking the shadowy figures behind what the company says is a major Web ad-fraud machine.

More: Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check, Computerworld and Digits. Tweets: @microsoftdcu

Kevin Roose / New York Magazine:

Mirroring Amazon, Uber could evolve into a platform for transportation and logistical services — Uber Might Be More Valuable Than Facebook Someday. Here's Why — One of the odd things about traveling between the Bay Area and New York a lot is the asynchronicity of mass culture between coasts …

Tweets: @mattrosoff

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Why is Microsoft scared of Chromebooks? — Something has Redmond spooked — “It's pretty much a brick,” says Pawn Stars' Rick Harrison as he rejects a Samsung Chromebook brought in by an actor playing a customer. Microsoft really doesn't want you buying this thing. — But why?

More: Electronista, Maximum PC, Forbes, CNET, Inquirer, Digital Trends, Ubergizmo, GeekWire, BGR, TechCrunch and 9to5Google. Tweets: @hunterwalk

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

Too many startups are now building poorly differentiated messaging apps — Overrun With Messaging Apps — Because I'll install almost any app on my iPhone just to take a look, I've got a jam-packed folder called “messaging apps” that's now five pages deep.

More: CNET. Tweets: @stevesi, @joshconstine and @caseynewton

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