Techmeme: Google's webspam lead Matt Cutts taking leave for a “few” months after 15 years at the company (Matt Cutts/Gadgets, Google, and SEO)

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July 4, 2014, 4:15 AM

Top News

Panorama:

Investigation of leaked source code reveals NSA tracks users of Tor website, calls visitors to Tails and Linux Journal sites “extremists” — NSA targets the privacy-conscious — The investigation discloses the following: Two servers in Germany - in Berlin and Nuremberg - are under surveillance by the NSA.

More: Boing Boing, Wired, Schneier on Security, Linux Journal, Ars Technica, The Verge, Ars Technica, The Register, RT, Gigaom, PC World, Techdirt, PandoDaily and The Hill

Tweets: @ioerror, @kgosztola, @csoghoian, @csoghoian, @nsa_pr, @emptywheel, @arrington, @botherder and @csoghoian

Richard Stiennon / securitycurrent:

Bruce Schneier and other security experts believe code leaks originate from an NSA leaker other than Snowden — Is there Another NSA Leaker? — This morning a partial analysis of the NSA's XKEYSCORE code was published in Germany. Jacob Applebaum, an evangelist for the The Onion Project (TOR), was one of the authors.

More: The Register and CNET. Tweets: @antderosa, @edfelten, @nikcub and @nirajc

Reuters:

Google reverses decision, restores several links to Guardian stories after publisher protests — Google reverses decision to delete British newspaper links — (Reuters) - Google Inc GOOGL.O GOOG.O on Thursday reversed its decision to remove several links to stories in Britain's Guardian newspaper …

More: Guardian, 9to5Google, Engadget, New York Times, Quartz and Marketing Land

Tweets: @dannysullivan, @jledbetter and @dannysullivan

See also Mediagazer

Mathew Ingram / Gigaom:

The EU's “right to be forgotten” is a bad idea, and Google is handling it exactly the right way — This week, Google has begun notifying British media outlets that some of their news articles may not be available to UK audiences as a result of a European Union court decision enshrining the …

More: Wired, Digital Trends, New York Times and Guardian. Tweets: @ksablan. See also Mediagazer

Matt Cutts / Gadgets, Google, and SEO:

Google's webspam lead Matt Cutts taking leave for a “few” months after 15 years at the company — On Leave — I wanted to let folks know that I'm about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she'd get to see more of me.

More: Gigaom, Search Engine Land, Silicon Valley Watcher, TheDomains.com, PandoDaily and Search Engine Journal

Tweets: @dannysullivan, @mathewi, @codinghorror and @jeffjarvis

Kellex / Droid Life:

Verizon Prepaid is Finally Getting 4G LTE, Likely on July 17 — According to sources of ours, Verizon prepaid is finally getting access to the carrier's massive 4G LTE network come July 17. As those of you in the prepaid game know, Verizon has lagged behind others in terms of prepaid data speeds …

More: PhoneNews.com, Gigaom, 9to5Google and SeekingAlpha.com

Kevin Montgomery / Gawker:

Restaurant Reservation Scalping Site Is Everything Wrong with SF — There are two things startups shouldn't f**k with in San Francisco. One is parking, and the other is restaurants. San Francisco is, after all, a city of foodies. Techies write bots to score competitive reservations.

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

Facebook Becomes A Local Party Discovery Tool With “Events For You” Redesign — Just because you weren't invited, doesn't mean Facebook can't help you crash the party. Facebook Events on the web got a slick visual overhaul today that includes a new “Events For You” tab that recommends gatherings …

More: The Next Web. Tweets: @joshconstine

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

Music Streaming Eats Downloads With On-Demand Up 42% Over 2013, Digital Sales Down 12% — Nielsen's U.S. music report on the first half of 2014 shows digital music consumption rapidly shifting from downloads to streaming. On-demand streaming was up 42% over the first half of 2013, racking up 70 billion play in the first half of 2014.

More: Variety, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Billboard

Andy Greenberg / Wired:

miniLock: A free and open-source browser plugin to let anyone easily encrypt and decrypt files — The Ultra-Simple App That Lets Anyone Encrypt Anything — Encryption is hard. When NSA leaker Edward Snowden wanted to communicate with journalist Glenn Greenwald via encrypted email …

Tweets: @kaepora, @micahflee, @jeremybmerrill and @your_anon_news

Hayley Tsukayama / Washington Post:

Pew study: biggest threats to internet in next 20 years are government and online corporations — Researchers asked 1,400 experts to describe the biggest threats to the Web. Here's what they said. — What are the biggest threats to the Internet in the next 20 years?

More: Pew Internet, USA Today, Slate, MarketWatch, MediaPost, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Phys.org, Multichannel News, Tech Times, The Verge, SiliconBeat, Nieman Journalism Lab, NPR and Poynter. Tweets: @jguynn

Joe Rossignol / 9to5Google:

EFF warns that Android might be broadcasting your location history, Google investigating possible changes — Last month, Apple quietly unveiled a new feature in iOS 8 that automatically scrambles an iOS device's MAC address when it is searching for Wi-Fi networks.

More: Electronic Frontier Foundation, Computerworld, Electronista, The Register, The Next Web, Daily Dot, BGR and The Verge

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