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July 20, 2014, 9:40 PM

Top News

Kim Zetter / Wired:

How Ladar Levison and a convicted hacker aim to encrypt emails, including to and from fields, with Dark Mail — A Convicted Hacker and an Internet Icon Join Forces to Thwart NSA Spying — The internet is littered with burgeoning email encryption schemes aimed at thwarting NSA spying.

Tweets: @gmillard and @kgosztola

Rohin Dhar / Priceonomics Blog:

Sequoia Capital will likely earn more from investing in YC companies than YC — The Big Winner from Y Combinator's Success? Sequoia Capital — Yesterday, Y Combinator's president, Sam Altman, that the seed investment firm had funded 716 companies that were currently valued collectively at around $30 billion.

More: CB Insights. Tweets: @jason and @bryce

Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:

New search engine Indexus indexes records from data breaches, mostly from sites young hackers frequent — Even Script Kids Have a Right to Be Forgotten — Indexeus, a new search engine that indexes user account information acquired from more than 100 recent data breaches, has caught many in the hacker underground off-guard.

More: The Verge and Engadget. Tweets: @_n1k_nak, @cert_polska_en and @teamcymru

Author Earnings:

Study: 31% of ebooks sold on Amazon are self-published; DRM harms sales at all price levels — July 2014 Author Earnings Report — It has been nearly half a year since we first pulled data for nearly every ranked ebook on Amazon.com's thousands of category bestseller lists.

More: Boing Boing and Good E-Reader

Jeff Bercovici / Forbes:

Buzzfeed now receives more traffic from Pinterest than from Twitter — Nailed It: Buzzfeed Cracks The Pinterest Code — Buzzfeed is one of of the fastest growing media companies ever, with a monthly audience of 150 million and counting, thanks chiefly to its unmatched understanding of what people will read or share on Facebook.

Nitasha Tiku / Valleywag:

Product Hunt Founder Explains Why The Hell He Joined Y Combinator — Industry obsessives talk about Product Hunt—a leaderboard that lets members vote on new apps, devices, and other assorted technologies—with a sense of gratefulness. Venture capitalists use its hand-picked daily list to find a diamond in the deluge.

Tweets: @nitashatiku and @hunterwalk

Alexis C. Madrigal / The Atlantic Online:

How a small team inside Google built Stories, a tool that organizes photos into narratives — How to Teach Google What a Story Is — Google wanted to solve a problem we can all understand. People take so, so many photographs and yet they actually do very little with them.

Tweets: @arainert, @garynielson, @jeluebering and @thebareview. Thanks:@steverubel

Arik Hesseldahl / Re/code:

Edward Snowden Plans to Work on Privacy Tech — NSA leaker Edward Snowden says he plans to work on technology to preserve personal data privacy and called on programmers to join his efforts. — Speaking via a Google Hangout at the Hackers on Planet Earth Conference in New York …

More: Motherboard, Reuters, BetaNews, TechCrunch and Guardian

John Napier Tye / Washington Post:

Meet Executive Order 12333: The Reagan rule that lets the NSA spy on Americans

More: ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation. Tweets: @csoghoian, @kenroth, @astepanovich, @trevortimm and @csoghoian

Andy Baio / Medium:

How to fake flawless predictions for any sports event or election using social media — How to Flawlessly Predict Anything on the Internet — Spark conspiracies, incite riots, and predict the future with a confidence scam for the Twitter era — On Saturday, a Twitter account appeared …

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