Techmeme
December 15, 2013, 5:30 AM

Top News

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 …
Conor Friedersdorf / The Atlantic Online:
How Americans Were Deceived About Cell Phone Location Data  —  Remember when multiple Obama Administration figures said the NSA doesn't collect it?  That wasn't true.  —  Shortly after the earliest articles sourced to Edward Snowden appeared, Americans newly aware of the cell phones …
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 …
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.
Allison Arieff / New York Times:
As tech companies embrace urban life, many in San Francisco remain closed off from their city  —  What Tech Hasn't Learned From Urban Planning  —  SAN FRANCISCO — The tech sector is, increasingly, embracing the language of urban planning — town hall, public square, civic hackathons, community engagement.
Janko Roettgers / Gigaom:
Chromecast in 2014: an open SDK, big international plans and maybe even new devices  —  Google landed a bit of a coup with Chromecast this year, launching a device that no one saw coming but that has proven to be very popular.  Next year, the company plans to take Chromecast even further …
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.
Cyrus Farivar / Ars Technica:
Boston Police indefinitely suspends license plate reader program  —  The Boston Police Department currently has 14 license plate scanners, which are often mounted on police cars.  —  cle0patra  —  The Boston Police Department (BPD) has indefinitely halted its use of license plate readers …
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.

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Jennifer Golbeck / Slate:

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