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December 14, 2013, 8:55 PM

Top News

John Markoff / New York Times:

Google acquires Boston Dynamics, maker of BigDog, Petman, and other research robots — Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots — SAN FRANCISCO — BigDog, Cheetah, WildCat and Atlas have joined Google's growing robot menagerie. — Google confirmed on Friday that it had completed …

New York Times:

Officials Say U.S. May Never Know Extent of Snowden's Leaks — WASHINGTON — American intelligence and law enforcement investigators have concluded that they may never know the entirety of what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden extracted from classified government computers …

More: CBS News, TechCrunch, SlashGear, Business Insider and Newsy

Tweets: @trdeghett, @nxthompson, @trevortimm, @mlcalderone and @ggreenwald

Jonathan Stempel / Reuters:

Lawsuit accuses IBM of hiding China risks amid NSA spy scandal — (Reuters) - IBM Corp has been sued by a shareholder who accused it of concealing how its ties to what became a major U.S. spying scandal reduced business in China and ultimately caused its market value to plunge more than $12 billion.

More: Businessweek, AllThingsD, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Business Wire, SlashGear, Gigaom, Guardian and TechEye

Washington Post:

By cracking cellphone code, NSA has capacity for decoding private conversations

More: The Atlantic Online, Engadget, iMore, Ars Technica, Matt Blaze's Exhaustive Search, Newsy, NBCNews, The Droid Guy, Gizmodo and Mashable

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

Yoree Koh / Digits:

Twitter Test Shows ‘Nearby’ Tweets — Twitter has an eye on your location — and is testing ways to share it with other nearby users. — The short-messaging service appears to be testing a new timeline for its mobile app, called “Nearby.” It shows recent nearby tweets, whether you follow the tweeter or not.

More: SlashGear, Electronista, CNET, The Verge, TechCrunch and The Next Web

Leena Rao / TechCrunch:

As Software Eats The World, Non-Tech Corporations Are Eating Startups — Netscape founder and VC titan Marc Andreessen famously wrote back in 2011 that software is steadily eating the world, disrupting industries like music, retail and more. Now large corporations in these industries are starting to eat startups.

Tweets: @jess, @alexisohanian and @mdudas

Casey Johnston / Ars Technica:

Instagram senders can delete their messages from recipients' phones — The Instagram Direct interface, which allows you to share photos directly to a subset of those you follow, rather than to all your followers. — The surface read of Instagram's announcement of a messaging-like feature today was a bit underwhelming.

Damon Lavrinc / Wired:

Ford Unveils Its First Autonomous Vehicle Prototype — Ford has thrown its hat into autonomous car ring with the debut of its Automated Fusion Hybrid Research Vehicle, the latest in a series of steps the automaker is taking to realize its grand vision of transportation in 2025.

More: Ford Media, The Verge, Autoblog, Autoweek, PC Magazine, SlashGear, VentureBeat, Engadget, Gigaom and TechHive

Brendan O'Connor / The Awl:

The Golden Era Of Spam Comments Has Ended — The search engine optimization community has spent the last two years in a panic. SEO people flood our Internet with spam links and fake Twitter bots and paid traffic, to help bad websites look more popular than they are, to deliver fake viewers to web ads.

More: Boing Boing. Tweets: @plamere, @markjaquith, @jonhrach, @awl, @peterrojas, @thijs and @waxylinks. See also Mediagazer

Jennifer Golbeck / Slate:

Facebook collects metadata on “self-censorship”, updates you begin typing but don't publish — Facebook wants to know why you didn't publish that status update you started writing — Facebook wants to know why you didn't publish that status update you started writing.

More: BGR. Tweets: @jengolbeck, @jengolbeck, @mathewi, @jennyjinx, @slate, @courosa, @rcalo, @monstro and @joshelman

Mikey Campbell / AppleInsider:

Apple's iOS nabbed 76% of small & medium business device activations in 2013, study says — According to SMB email management company Intermedia, some 190,000 iPhones and iPads were activated on its network in the first ten months of 2013, grossly outpacing No. 2 Samsung's 29,000 activations.

More: TechCrunch, Gigaom Research, MacNN, Yahoo! News, SecurityWeek and PadGadget

Rich McCormick / The Verge:

New Google Tips is surprisingly helpful — Google has launched Google Tips, a site which uses clickable cards to explain the features and capabilities of Google's biggest products. The cards explain concepts such as sharing photos with specific people in Google+ circles …

More: The Next Web, TechnoBuffalo, PC World, Electronista, Softpedia News and Mashable. Tweets: @howardlindzon

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