Techmeme: Germany recorded John Kerry, Hillary Clinton phone calls ‘by accident’ (Dante D'Orazio/The Verge)

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August 16, 2014, 7:00 PM

Top News

Jeff Minich / Business Insider:

Ex-employee defends Yahoo: Mayer is ignoring legacy ad business to focus on potential growth — A Former Yahoo Employee Defends Marissa Mayer From Her Biggest Critic — Eric Jackson has had a lot to say about Marissa Mayer and Yahoo lately. He's a smart guy, I read his column and think he's generally an astute investor.

Tweets: @kimbatronic, @jaudrius, @anildash and @karaswisher

Kara Swisher / Re/code:

Investor Eric Jackson pesters Yahoo and its CEO, hoping to attract activist investor or buyer — A Yahoo Fanboy Turns Critic: “I Am Committed to Remaining a Pest” — What exactly is investor and Forbes columnist Eric Jackson up to with his now month-old blog attack on Yahoo and, most pointedly, its CEO, Marissa Mayer?

Heise:

GCHQ's “HACIENDA” program completed full port scans targeting 27 countries — NSA/GCHQ: The HACIENDA Program for Internet Colonization — Translations of this article are available in German, French, Italian and Spanish. — Since the early days of TCP …

More: IETF Datatracker, tum.de, Gigaom, PC World and The Register

Tweets: @kashhill, @fredericjacobs, @ashk4n, @cyberwar and @ioerror

Rémi Rousseau / Medium:

Surgeon uses synchronized GoPros to record surgery, Oculus Rift to play it back for students — Virtual surgery gets real — What the Oculus Rift could mean for the future of medecine — Technological innovation takes time : virtual reality has been a thing in the medical field …

More: SlashGear, Mashable and Road to Virtual Reality. Tweets: @levie

Cat Zakrzewski / TechCrunch:

Uber To Test Moving Services In Atlanta, Nashville — Earlier this summer, we saw Uber experiment with UberRUSH, a courier service in New York City. The car service seems to be testing the waters for another service, announcing it will move Atlanta college students and Nashville residents this weekend.

More: Uber Blog, Uber Blog, TechRadar.com, Nooga.com and Nashville Public Radio

Selena Larson / ReadWrite:

Medium adds public follower and following lists to profile pages, catching users off guard — In Exposing Followers, Medium Fails Readers — If Medium wants to turn itself into a respectable publisher, it probably shouldn't behave like a social network.

More: Medium. See also Mediagazer

Greg Finn / Search Engine Land:

Farewell ‘Pure’ Exact Match, AdWords Will Soon Require All Campaigns To Use Close Variants — Today Google has announced that in late September, AdWords advertisers will no longer have the ability to de-select close variants. All campaigns will now include these variants, something that advertisers could previously opt out of.

More: Inside AdWords, Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Watch, SEO Book, WordStream, Marketing Land, WebProNews, Search Engine Land, TechCrunch and State of Digital

Barton Gellman / Washington Post:

Spyware tools allow buyers to slip malicious code into YouTube videos, Microsoft pages — CloudShield Technologies, a California defense contractor, dispatched a senior engineer to Munich in the early fall of 2009. His instructions were unusually opaque. — As he boarded the flight …

More: The Intercept, The Citizen Lab, Digital Trends, The Verge, The Register and Gizmodo

Tweets: @csoghoian, @csoghoian, @anonyops, @thomas_drake1, @youranonnews, @ciphersuite, @dangillmor, @evacide, @dangoodin001, @kaepora, @ashk4n and @csoghoian

Lora Kolodny / Wall Street Journal:

Club Penguin founder Lane Merrifeld raises $4.3M for education software company FreshGrade — FreshGrade Raises $4.3M to Connect Teachers, Students and Parents … Club Penguin founder Lane Merrifeld sold his kid-safe, massively multiplayer online gaming community to Walt Disney Co. in 2007 in what amounted to a $350 million deal.

More: VentureBeat, PE Hub Blog, Re/code, EdSurge and Techvibes Global News

Dante D'Orazio / The Verge:

Germany recorded John Kerry, Hillary Clinton phone calls ‘by accident’ — Secretary of State John Kerry and his predecessor, Hilary Clinton, were both caught up in German spy efforts, says a new report. According to German weekly Der Spiegel, the country's foreign intelligence agency …

More: Reuters, Ars Technica, CNET, Associated Press, RT, Europe and Guardian

Mike Williams / BBC:

UK Premier League warns about posting goal videos, says it's developing tech to find violators — Premier League warns about posting goal videos online — The Premier League has told Newsbeat they're going to clamp down on fans posting unofficial videos of goals online.

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:

Explainer: How Google's New SSL / HTTPS Ranking Factor Works — Last Thursday, Google launched a new ranking signal to give HTTPS sites a ranking boost, a small ranking boost, to encourage webmasters to migrate their sites from HTTP to HTTPS. — In our story from Thursday …

More: Stone Temple Consulting and Search Engine Roundtable

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