Techmeme
February 27, 2014, 10:50 AM

Top News

Guardian:
GCHQ, aided by NSA, intercepted and stored webcam images of millions of global Yahoo users  —  UK spy agency intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users  —  • Optic Nerve program collected Yahoo webcam images in bulk  —  • 1.8m users targeted by GCHQ in six-month period alone
Harry McCracken / TIME:
Project Ara: Inside Google's Bold Gambit to Make Smartphones Modular  —  The two-year quest to create the ultimate customizable phone, inside and out.  —  On January 29, Google announced that it had agreed to sell Motorola, its phone-manufacturing business, to Chinese electronics giant Lenovo.
Andy Greenberg / Forbes:
Steven Perlberg / Business Insider:
Carl Icahn Goes After The eBay Board In A New Open Letter With 6 Facts  —  Carl Icahn is out with a new open letter to the shareholders of eBay.  —  There has been quite a back and forth between the activist investor and eBay's board, and the scrap continues today with Icahn laying out six “facts.”
More: Shareholders Square TableTweets: @cnbc
eBay, Inc.:
Statement by Pierre Omidyar, eBay Inc. Chairman of the Board  —  I am eBay Inc.'s founder, board chairman and largest shareholder.  —  A new eBay shareholder, Carl Icahn, is making unsubstantiated claims about our company — and deliberately impugning the integrity of our directors.
More: TechCrunch and GeekWireTweets: @pmarca
Emil Protalinski / The Next Web:
Facebook Messenger for Windows will shut down on March 3  —  Facebook today began prompting Facebook Messenger for Windows users with a message saying the app is shutting down next week.  Without much of an explanation, the company plans to kill off Windows support for Facebook Messenger on March 3.
Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:
Apple retires Snow Leopard from support, leaves 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable to attacks  —  Twice now that Apple's bypassed Snow Leopard when it patched newer editions  —  Apple on Tuesday made it clear that it will no longer patch OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, when it again declined to offer …
More: ReadWrite, BGR and Softpedia NewsTweets: @r0h1n
Douglas MacMillan / Wall Street Journal:
Marketing Chief Kathy Savitt's Star Rises at Yahoo  —  A management shake-up at Yahoo Inc. has conferred more power on Kathy Savitt, a marketing executive who has quickly risen to become one of Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's most prominent and trusted lieutenants.
More: bizjournals and GeekWireTweets: @wsjd
Sam Byford / The Verge:
Nintendo ending DS and Wii online multiplayer in May  —  Nintendo has announced that it will end support for its online multiplayer service on the DS and Wii.  Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection will shut down on May 20th, meaning that games will no longer work online; offline features, however, will continue to work.
Eric Johnson / Re/code:
A Long Tail of Whales: Half of Mobile Games Money Comes From 0.15 Percent of Players  —  Oh, you've spent a couple dollars on Candy Crush?  How cute.  —  In a mobile monetization report released today, app testing firm Swrve found that in January, half of free-to-play games' in-app purchases came from 0.15 percent of players.
Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:
The Fingerprint Scanner On The Samsung Galaxy S5 Will Be Accessible By Developers  —  Samsung's Galaxy S5 includes a fingerprint scanner embedded in the home button, and that hardware will be made available to third-party devs, the company announced today at a developer-focused event during MWC this year.
Derrick Harris / Gigaom:
IBM is challenging developers to insert Watson into mobile apps  —  At the Mobile World Congress event today, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty laid down the gauntlet for mobile developers.  Over the next three months, IBM will host its Watson Mobile Developer Challenge to find the best ideas for mobile apps …
CoinDesk:
Exclusive: State of Bitcoin 2014 Report Analyses Emerging Trends  —  Today CoinDesk is pleased to release its first ever ‘State of Bitcoin’ report.  —  This report is not intended to be another guide to answer the question ‘what is bitcoin?’, which we cover in detail elsewhere on our site.
More: VentureBeatTweets: @coindesk and @laurenlyster

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Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:
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Tatiana Siegel / Hollywood Reporter: