Techmeme: AT&T charges at least $44 more per month for GigaPower plans if you opt out of web monitoring, and makes this pricing hard to discover (Stacey Higginbotham/Gigaom)

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February 22, 2015, 9:35 PM

Top News

Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch:

Twitter Vice Presidents of product and engineering discuss how Twitter makes product decisions — Twitter's Dilemma — Twitter is two things. It is a concept — everyone in the world connected in real time — that's so obvious in retrospect that it is impossible to imagine it not existing.

More: Daring Fireball. Tweets: @mdudas, @travisbernard, @sub8u, @chartier, @valaafshar and @alexia

Kevin Roose / Fusion:

Meet the tweet-deleters: people who are making their Twitter histories self-destruct — Like most media workers, Matthew Lazin-Ryder, a Vancouver-based producer with CBC Radio, spends a fair amount of time on Twitter. When he tweets, his messages are seen by some percentage of his 3,470 followers.

More: Daring Fireball. Tweets: @nkulw, @kevinroose, @cpen, @arainert, @zseward, @antderosa, @sfiegerman, @alexjamesfitz, @jnpayne, @digiphile, @hunterwalk, @digiphile and @travelfish

Vlad Savov / The Verge:

HTC One M9 pics and specs leak ahead of March 1st launch, will feature a 2GHz Snapdragon 810 CPU, 3GB of RAM, 5-inch 1080p display, and a 20MP camera — HTC One M9 pictures and specs leak out — As usual with HTC, the next great Android smartphone from the Taiwanese company has apparently …

More: Android Authority, Gizmodo, Droid Life, SlashGear, TechRadar.com, Ubergizmo, AndroidHeadlines.com, GSMArena.com, Engadget, TechCrunch, Pocket-lint, MobileSyrup.com, Neowin and TechnoBuffalo

Tweets: @reckless and @detroitborg

Kevin Poulsen / Wired:

Equation Group shows US already has a Manhattan Project for cybersecurity, but like the original, it's purely offensive — Surprise! America Already Has a Manhattan Project for Developing Cyber Attacks — “What we really need is a Manhattan Project for cybersecurity.”

More: Backchannel and CircleID. Tweets: @henriquebastos and @jason_healey

Jillian D'Onfro / Business Insider:

How flash sale site Gilt Groupe overextended and lost focus after rapid growth and fundraising — Four years ago Gilt Groupe was the hottest startup in New York — Here's what happened — Four years ago, luxury flash-sales startup Gilt Groupe was one of the buzziest e-commerce startups in the world …

Tweets: @borthwick

Stacey Higginbotham / Gigaom:

AT&T charges at least $44 more per month for GigaPower plans if you opt out of web monitoring, and makes this pricing hard to discover — Don't let AT&T mislead you about its $29 “privacy fee” — This week AT&T got a lot of media attention for its expansion of its GigaPower service to Kansas City announced on Monday.

More: Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Guardian

Tweets: @gigastacey, @mweinbergpk, @gigastacey and @elissabeth

Angie Han / /Film:

Oliver Stone to direct an Edward Snowden biopic, set for a Christmas 2015 release — Oliver Stone's ‘Snowden’ Sets Christmas Release; Adds Timothy Olyphant and More — Every year, the studios release approximately 8 million prestige dramas between November and December …

More: Deadline, Hollywood Reporter, Ars Technica and Variety. Tweets: @codinghorror

Caitlin Dewey / Washington Post:

Spanish shoeshine guards Twitter handles like @Canada and @Japan until he can give ownership to governments — Meet the Spanish shoeshine guy who secretly guards Twitter's greatest real estate — Officially, Javier Castaño is a 50-year-old shoeshine guy at a cafe in Malaga, Spain.

Tweets: @alexhortontx, @luefkens and @digiphile

Leslie Price / Racked:

What the Tech World Doesn't Understand About Fashion — The tech world is infatuated with fashion. This is because fashion has something tech seriously wants: the ability to create and sustain demand for products that are—let's face it—kind of useless. — “We desperately need …

Tweets: @lessien, @vijayshekhar and @charlesarthur

Ernesto / TorrentFreak:

Tumblr adds “torrent” to adult content filter hiding related posts and searches from non-logged in users — Tumblr Censors “Torrent” Related Tags and Searches — It appears that piracy is becoming a growing concern for micro-blogging platform Tumblr.

More: SlashGear, Neowin, Vuze Dev Blog and ResearchBuzz

Harry McCracken / Fast Company:

How Line fused messaging, gaming, and merchandising into a pop culture phenomenon in Japan — How Japan's Line App Became A Culture-Changing, Revenue-Generating Phenomenon — IT'S ALREADY A POWERHOUSE IN MESSAGING, ENTERTAINMENT, AND MERCHANDISE, WITH PAYMENTS AND MORE ON THE WAY. NEXT STOP: AMERICA.

More: PYMNTS.com. Tweets: @harrymccracken. Thanks:@mariedomingo

Jamie Rigg / Engadget:

Hands-on with Windows 10 Technical Preview for phones, which adds interactive notifications, a customizable “Action Center”, new Photos and File Explorer apps — An in-depth look at the Windows 10 Technical Preview for phones — By now, you will have heard at least something about Windows 10 …

More: TechCrunch, PC World, Digital Trends and Pocket-lint

Johana Bhuiyan / BuzzFeed:

Uber must mature, but its victory over competitors and regulators seems certain in the US — It's Already Over And Uber Has Won — Money isn't everything, but it's certainly a useful metric for keeping score, especially when you're measuring it in the billions.

More: New York Times. Tweets: @jonrussell, @chrisgeidner, @mikeisaac, @dnvolz and @jspeedymorris22. Thanks:@jmbooyah

Fusion:

How the JOBS Act, investor demand, and private securities markets allow Uber to stay private

Tweets: @stephaniemlee

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