Techmeme: Trevor O'Brien, the Product Lead Running All Twitter Apps, Is Departing (Kurt Wagner/Re/code)

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August 1, 2015, 4:40 PM

Top News

David E. Sanger / New York Times:

Anonymous Obama administration sources say US will retaliate against China for OPM hack and is weighing options that include breaching the Great Firewall — U.S. Decides to Retaliate Against China's Hacking — The Obama administration has determined that it must retaliate against China …

More: Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, International Business Times, hakspek.com, Engadget and The Verge

Tweets: @dangillmor, @gaberivera and @thegrugq

Dina Bass / Bloomberg Business:

Microsoft Said to Invest About $100 Million in Startup Uber — Microsoft Corp. has agreed to invest about $100 million in Uber Technologies Inc. at a valuation of approximately $50 billion, a person with knowledge of the matter said. — The deal was finalized earlier on Friday …

More: WinBeta, Mashable, Forbes, siliconrus.com and Neowin

Wall Street Journal:

Sources: Uber closed round of nearly $1B with Microsoft participating, valuing the company at over $50B and bringing total funding to more than $5B — Uber Valued at More Than $50 Billion — Ride-sharing app, which just closed a funding round, reaches mark faster than Facebook

Washington Post:

Former DNI Mike McConnell, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, and Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn back strong encryption in op-ed — Why the fear over ubiquitous data encryption is overblown — Clarification: Due to a production error, a version of this column was temporarily posted prematurely …

More: Wall Street Journal, Schneier on Security, Techdirt, Engadget and International Business Times

Tweets: @mattblaze, @ronwyden, @lorenzofb, @xor, @emptywheel, @normative, @paulbernaluk, @konklone and @pmarca

Takashi Mochizuki / Wall Street Journal:

Japanese Police Arrest Mark Karpelès of Collapsed Bitcoin Exchange Mt. Gox — Official says police allege he manipulated the company's computer system to inflate its assets — TOKYO—Japanese police on Saturday arrested Mark Karpelès, the head of collapsed bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox …

More: New York Times, Ars Technica, TheDomains.com, Gizmodo, Reuters, CIO.com, Fusion, CoinDesk, Guardian, NEWSBTC and CoinTelegraph.Com News

Patrick Howell O'Neill / The Daily Dot:

Hackers find vulnerabilities in Industrial Ethernet Switches used in hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants — How hackers can take over nuclear power plants — The world's most important facilities—think massive hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants—are vulnerable to devastating cyberattacks.

More: TechWorm. Thanks:@dellcam

Kurt Wagner / Re/code:

Trevor O'Brien, the Product Lead Running All Twitter Apps, Is Departing — Another key product exec is leaving Twitter. — Trevor O'Brien, who joined Twitter a year and a half ago from YouTube and oversees product for Twitter's iOS and Android apps, is departing the company, according to multiple sources.

More: BuzzFeed. Tweets: @tmobrien and @heyheyesj

New York Times:

Xiaoice, Microsoft's Chinese chatbot, has a sense of humor, good listening skills, and 20M registered users — For Sympathetic Ear, More Chinese Turn to Smartphone Program — She is known as Xiaoice, and millions of young Chinese pick up their smartphones every day to exchange messages with her …

More: Business Insider and Daily Mail

Heather Somerville / Mercury News:

Lyft forgoes global expansion in favor of U.S. market domination — SAN FRANCISCO — Lyft has walked back years of promises about a global expansion, and instead the car-booking company is doubling down on the U.S. market, hoping to beat its biggest foe here at home.

Tweets: @jonrussell and @glennf

Dante D'Orazio / The Verge:

Microsoft's HoloLens will ship to developers ‘within the next year’ — Microsoft will release “V1” of its HoloLens virtual reality headset sooner rather than later. CEO Satya Nadella said that the first developer version of the hologram-projecting device will come out “within the next year” …

More: BBC, Digital Trends, Neowin and Windows Central

Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:

Yahoo Will Acquire Fashion Startup Polyvore — Yahoo just announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire style-focused community Polyvore. — In a blog post about the deal, Yahoo's senior vice president of publisher products Simon Khalaf highlighted “Polyvore's expertise …

More: Yahoo, Business Wire, Business Insider, Marissa's Tumblr, The Official Blog of Polyvore, ZDNet, Ubergizmo, New York Times, eWeek, The Technology Chronicles, AdExchanger, internetretailer.com, The Verge, The Next Web, SiliconBeat, VentureBeat, Search Engine Land and silicontap.com. Tweets: @jeffweiner

Mike Masnick / Techdirt:

4th Amendment Lives: Court Tells US Government Get A Warrant If It Wants Mobile Phone Location Info — A potentially big ruling came out of the courtroom of Judge Lucy Koh yesterday, in which she affirmed a magistrate judge's decision to tell the government to get a warrant if it wants …

More: ZDNet

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