Techmeme: Creator of @everyword explains the life and death of a Twitter experiment (Ruth Spencer/Guardian)

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June 8, 2014, 8:50 PM

Top News

Mat Honan / Wired:

Interactive notifications in iOS 8 are a new interface frontier — Why Notifications Are About to Rule the Smartphone Interface — When iOS 8 hits, the notification center is going to be the most important screen in your iPhone. Think about it: Notifications already …

More: Daring Fireball. Tweets: @mdudas, @stevesi, @dkr, @niemanlab, @smc90, @smc90 and @tonyromm

Ruth Spencer / Guardian:

Creator of @everyword explains the life and death of a Twitter experiment — In 2007, Adam Parrish created an enormously popular account to tweet the English language a word at a time. He explains why he did it and what he learned — Creator Adam Parrish: 'It's kind of a magical writing experiment.'

More: Engadget, Neowin, PC Magazine, decontextualizedecontextualize, The Verge, The Atlantic Online, Digital Trends and Gizmodo

Tweets: @kathrynschulz and @bgzimmer

Michael Crider / Android Police:

Google Now Has An Alarm That Can Wake You Up To Keep You From Missing Your Stop On Public Transportation — It's Saturday night. You've spent the last six hours partaking of the fruit of the vine in pleasant company (read: you're so drunk that your date is getting a contact buzz).

More: Engadget, Business Insider, TechnoBuffalo, PC Magazine, 9to5Google, Neowin, GSMArena Blog, Android and Me, Android Central and Gizmodo

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

“WARNING Your phone is locked!” Crypto ransomware makes its debut on Android — Security researchers have documented another first in the annals of Android malware: a trojan that encrypts photos, videos, and documents stored on a device and demands a ransom for them to be restored.

More: We Live Security, Guardian, Computerworld, The Register, BBC, SC Magazine, Techie News, The Hacker News, SlashGear, SecurityWeek, BGR, MacDailyNews, BetaNews, Android Community and Inquirer

New York Times:

How Google, Facebook, and other tech giants are now more actively impeding government spying — Internet Giants Erect Barriers to Spy Agencies — MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Just down the road from Google's main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become …

More: Business Insider and TIME. Tweets: @marymad, @jpbarlow, @paulszoldra, @ggreenwald, @kenroth, @csoghoian, @granick and @the_intercept

Kashmir Hill / Forbes:

Mathematicians Urge Colleagues To Refuse To Work For The NSA

Tweets: @papakipos, @leeannmcadoo, @forbestech, @profkeithdevlin, @kenwsmith54 and @kashhill

io9:

Researchers claim chatbot impersonating a 13yo non-native speaker is first to beat Turing Test — A Chatbot Has ‘Passed’ The Turing Test For The First Time — A Russian chatterbot named “Eugene Goostman” has become the first to pass the Turing Test - an assessment of machine intelligence …

More: University of Reading, The Independent, Telegraph, The Verge, Ars Technica, kottke.org, VentureBeat, The Wire, NBC News, Gizmodo, CNET News, Polygon, Business Insider, Daily Dot, ZDNet, All New Musings, Quartz, Descrier, Engadget, Gawker and Digital Trends

Tweets: @marshallk, @mkapor, @markoff, @cdixon and @cdixon

Ernesto / TorrentFreak:

‘Popcorn Time’ Gives Users Anonymity With a Free Built-In VPN — The Popcorn Time phenomenon took the Internet by storm earlier this year. The software became the subject of hundreds of news articles, as it offered P2P streaming in an easy to use Netflix-style interface.

Tweets: @glynmoody

Mathew Ingram / Gigaom:

RebelMouse relaunches as a full-fledged publishing platform that's tuned for viral content — Two years ago, former Huffington Post chief technology officer Paul Berry launched a site called RebelMouse to give media companies and users of all kinds a way of aggregating the various pieces …

More: RebelMouse, Capital New York, Fast Company and The Next Web

Joshua Topolsky / The Verge:

Meet the new Apple: Fitter, happier, and ready to play — Fitter, happier, and ready to play — While I watched Apple's WWDC 2014 opening keynote on Monday morning, I couldn't stop thinking about the infectious mixture of fun and confidence everyone onstage seemed to be exuding.

More: iMore, Vox, stratechery and Conversation Agent

Tweets: @davewiner, @50champ, @oburt, @nbelloni and @jsnell

Nick Kokonas / Alinea:

Inside the development of Alinea's restaurant ticketing system built to replace reservations — Tickets for Restaurants — Resos vs. Access Apps vs. Tix: More Than You'd Ever Care to Know — Ticketing for restaurants has been in the news a lot lately. Here are just a few articles:

More: Gigaom Research. Tweets: @ajitpaifcc, @dansinker, @stoweboyd, @therealfitz, @waxpancake and @anildash

Bruce Upbin / Forbes:

Flaw in millions of TVs lets researchers hijack digital broadcasts, inject malicious code — Red Button Flaw Exposes Major Vulnerability In Millions of Smart TVs — It's 9:30 p.m. on a Sunday in New York City. People in their apartments in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan …

More: Engadget, Gizmodo and SlashGear

Tweets: @dsilverman, @dfmag, @dabeaz, @forbestech and @kashhill

Thanks:@thealexknapp

Matthew Yglesias / Vox:

Uber could be worth $18B if it greatly expands the size of the paid rides market — Why Uber just might be worth it at $18 billion — Uber, the pioneering taxi-hailing app and ride dispatch service, scored an impressive $18.2 billion valuation last week as it raised $1.2 billion in new venture capital.

More: Wall Street Journal. Tweets: @edwardnh, @ernmando, @greglinden, @danielmwolf and @rolfewinkler

Erin Griffith / Fortune:

Who are the investors making 2000X paper gains from Uber's first angel round?

More: PC Magazine, Bloomberg, Valleywag, Fortune, Wall Street Journal and Businessweek

Tweets: @dutchcowboy, @thestalwart and @chrisrcampbell

Ellis Hamburger / The Verge:

Taptalk takes on Snapchat with app for sending ephemeral photos and videos with one tap — This is the fastest photo chat app in the world — With Taptalk, it takes just one tap to send a photo or video — Taptalk is, dare I say, cooler than Snapchat.

Tweets: @hamburger

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