Techmeme: Yahoo CEO Mayer Apologizes For Mail Outage That She Says Affected 1% Of Users (Matthew Panzarino/TechCrunch)

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December 13, 2013, 10:55 PM

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Wall Street Journal:

Sprint Preparing a Bid for T-Mobile US — An Offer Would Test U.S. Regulators's Willingness to Have Just 3 Major Carriers — Sprint Corp. is working toward a possible bid for rival T-Mobile US Inc., people familiar with the matter said, setting the stage for a giant telecom merger …

Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Google Removes Vital Privacy Feature From Android, Claiming Its Release Was Accidental — Yesterday, we published a blog post lauding an extremely important app privacy feature that was added in Android 4.3. That feature allows users to install apps while preventing the app …

More: VentureBeat, Reuters, Engadget, PandoDaily, AllThingsD, 9to5Google, Guardian, BGR, The Register, Security Watch, ReadWrite, Network World, InfoWorld, Business Insider, Computerworld, The Verge, SlashGear, Daring Fireball, Softpedia News, Boing Boing and BetaNews

Tweets: @ncweaver, @eff, @csoghoian, @csoghoian and @daviottenheimer

Michael Steeber / 9to5Mac:

iOS 7.1 likely to unlock Apple's upcoming iOS in the Car feature — In July, we reported that Apple was already at work at iOS 7.1 and that it would build in support for the upcoming iOS in the Car feature: … iOS in the Car is a feature that allows customers to attach an iOS device …

More: AppleInsider, iDownloadBlog.com, MacRumors, BGR, Redmond Pie, App Advice, GeekSays, GeekSays, iPhone in Canada Blog and everythingiCafe

Washington Post:

By cracking cellphone code, NSA has capacity for decoding private conversations — The cellphone encryption technology used most widely across the world can be easily defeated by the National Security Agency, an internal document shows, giving the agency the means to decode most of the billions …

More: The Atlantic Online, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, The Droid Guy and Mashable

Tweets: @tweetsintheme, @csoghoian, @froomkin, @declanm, @ceciliakang, @trevortimm, @ashk4n and @jlllow

Horace Dediu / asymco.com:

How many Americans will be using an iPhone when the US smartphone market saturates? — As previously noted, the US smartphone market has followed an almost perfectly logistic growth. The measured data (via comScore, in green below) follows a predictive logistic function (thin blue whose formula is discussed here).

More: App Advice and Gigaom

Spencer Ackerman / Guardian:

NSA review to leave spying programs largely unchanged, reports say — A participant in a White House-sponsored review of surveillance activities described as “shameful” an apparent decision to leave most of the National Security Agency's controversial bulk spying intact.

More: Washington Post, The Verge, The Hill, Federal Computer Week, epic.org, Sascha Meinrath, TheHill and Business Insider. See also Mediagazer

Siobhan Gorman / Wall Street Journal:

Presidential Task Force Recommends Overhaul of Surveillance Tactics of NSA

More: New York Times, CNET, The Verge, TheHill, Softpedia News, Wired, AllThingsD, emptywheel, Techdirt, TechCrunch, CNET, Daily Dot and Guardian

Tweets: @normative, @digiphile, @lorenzofb, @dandrezner, @ggreenwald, @emptywheel and @kevinbankston

John Paczkowski / AllThingsD:

iPhones Dominate Sales at All Four Major U.S. Carriers — Apple's latest iPhones are topping the charts at U.S. carriers. — That's the latest from Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley, who says that the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c have been among the top three sellers …

More: 9to5Google, Examiner, FierceMobileIT News, The Droid Guy, SlashGear, Los Angeles Times, 9to5Mac and TUAW

Bloomberg:

Verizon close to buying Intel's Internet-based pay-TV startup OnCue, may announce the deal next week — Verizon Said Near Agreement to Buy Intel's Start-Up TV Service — Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) is near an agreement to purchase Intel Corp. (INTC)'s Internet-based pay-TV start-up, according to people familiar with the deal.

More: Electronista, SlashGear and Gigaom. See also Mediagazer

Robert McMillan / Wired:

U.S. Government Nastygram Shuts Down One-Man Bitcoin Mint — Mike Caldwell spent years turning digital currency into physical coins. That may sound like a paradox. But it's true. He takes bitcoins — the world's most popular digital currency — and then he mints them here in the physical world.

More: The Verge, CoinDesk, Hit & Run, Geek.com, SiliconANGLE, RT, PC Magazine and Union Square Ventures. Tweets: @binarybits

Jeremy C. Owens / Mercury News:

Nimble Storage gains more than 60 percent after IPO — SAN JOSE — Wall Street's heavy demand for new Silicon Valley companies has not waned as 2013 draws to a close: Nimble Storage shares flashed higher Friday in their market debut, gaining more than 60 percent.

More: Sequoia Capital, Venture Capital Dispatch, TechCrunch, Reuters, EE Times, VentureBeat, Business Insider, Gigaom, StorageMojo and Pulse 2.0

Jason Del Rey / AllThingsD:

Report: Readers who own a Kindle spend $1,233/year on Amazon; those who don't spend $790 — The Amazon Kindle Numbers That Jeff Bezos Must Really Care About — We all know that Amazon's annual touting of its new Kindles as the best-selling Kindles ever has become laughable since the company …

More: Examiner, Fortune, BetaNews, Internet Evolution, TechHive, GeekWire, Softpedia News and ECPM BLOG

Tweets: @strngwys and @bgurley

Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch:

Yahoo CEO Mayer Apologizes For Mail Outage That She Says Affected 1% Of Users — After a week of Yahoo Mail outages that began four days ago, CEO Marissa Mayer has posted an apology to the company Tumblr. In it, she gives some details about the issue, which was apparently related to a hardware failure …

More: Yahoo, Computerworld, The Next Web, Digits, The Verge and Mashable. Tweets: @digiphile

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