Techmeme
December 24, 2013, 6:00 PM

Top News

Nitasha Tiku / Valleywag:
Google's Investigating Rap Genius For Using Spammy SEO to Grow Traffic  —  How has Rap Genius distinguished itself all the other lyrics sites?  With sweet, sweet old school spam techniques, or at Silicon Valley likes to call it “growth hacking.”  The tactic is so shady that Matt Cutts …
More: jmarbach.com and VentureBeat.  Tweets: @nitashatiku
Barton Gellman / Washington Post:
Snowden says “the mission's already accomplished”, and he first shared concerns with numerous NSA co-workers  —  Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission's accomplished  —  MOSCOW — The familiar voice on the hotel room phone did not waste words.
Jonathan Cheng / Wall Street Journal:
Samsung Phone Studied for Possible Security Gap  —  Israeli Researchers Point to Alleged Vulnerability in Galaxy S4  —  SEOUL—The security platform for Samsung Electronics Co. 's best-selling Galaxy S4 smartphone suffers from a vulnerability that could allow malicious software to track emails …
Dana Wollman / Engadget:
Apple Mac Pro review (2013): small, fast and in a league of its own  —  It would be an understatement to say that Apple's Mac Pro workstation was getting a little long in the tooth.  As of summer 2012, it was missing Apple's own Thunderbolt ports, not to mention 802.11n WiFi.
Jeff Bercovici / Forbes:
Justine Sacco And The Self-Inflicted Perils Of Twitter  —  A few weeks ago, I had a drink with my friend Justine Sacco and we talked about what makes for a good Tweet.  —  Justine is an easy person to like — frank, funny, quick to laugh.  To a reporter, she's the kind of flack who's all too rare …
Bloomberg:
Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies  —  Italy's Parliament today passed a new measure on web advertising, the so-called “Google tax,” which will require Italian companies to purchase their Internet ads from locally registered companies, instead of from units based in havens such as Ireland, Luxembourg and Bermuda.
More: SlashGear and Forbes.  Tweets: @jessedrucker
Michael Crider / Android Police:
Oppo N1 CyanogenMod Edition Now Available, Along With A Factory Image And Source Code  —  Yes, CyanogenMod fans, there is a Santa Claus.  Cyanogen Inc. announced early on Christmas Eve morning that the long-awaited Oppo N1 CyanogenMod Edition is now available on Oppo's web store.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Mozilla's Asm.js Gets Another Step Closer To Native Performance  —  Mozilla's asm.js is a strict subset of JavaScript that Firefox can run significantly faster than regular JavaScript code.  Thanks to the so-called OdinMonkey module for Firefox's built-in JavaScript engine …
Dennis Fisher / Threatpost:
Stanford Researchers Find Connecting Metadata With User Names is Simple  —  One of the key tenets of the argument that the National Security Agency and some lawmakers have constructed to justify the agency's collection of phone metadata is that the information it's collecting …

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More News

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Jeremy C. Owens / Mercury News: