Techmeme
December 31, 2015, 6:35 AM

Top News

Chris Velazco / Engadget:
AT&T to stop offering two-year phone contracts on January 8, moving to up-front purchase of new phones or AT&T Next financing plans  —  AT&T to ditch most two-year phone contracts on January 8th  —  AT&T's long affair with the two-year contract seems to be coming to a close, Engadget has learned.
Joseph Menn / Reuters:
Former Microsoft employees say company failed to alert Hotmail users in 2011 that their accounts were hacked by Chinese authorities  —  Microsoft failed to warn victims of Chinese email hack - former employees  —  Microsoft Corp experts concluded several years ago that Chinese authorities …
Scott Charney / Microsoft on the Issues:
Microsoft now notifies users if it believes their accounts were targeted by a state-sponsored hacker  —  Additional steps to help keep your personal information secure  —  We're committed to helping our users keep their personal information secure and private.
Jordan Novet / VentureBeat:
Debian founder and Docker employee Ian Murdock has died at 42  —  Docker today announced that Ian Murdock, a member of the startup's technical staff and a former Sun and Salesforce employee known for founding the Debian Linux operating system, has passed away.  He was 42.
Jason Schreier / Kotaku:
Valve Apologizes For Steam's Christmas Malfunction, Says It Affected 34,000 Users  —  Valve has finally apologized for last week's Steam Christmas disaster, explaining in a lengthy statement today that the issues stemmed from a Denial of Service attack and wound up exposing the information of around 34,000 users.
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac:
Redesigned Twitter for Mac app now available with dark mode, GIF support, Group Direct Messages, Quote Tweet functionality, and more, but lacks polls support  —  Redesigned Twitter for Mac app with dark mode, GIF support, & more is now available  —  Earlier this year, Twitter promised …
Andrew J . Hawkins / The Verge:
Uber announces it completed its one billionth trip on Christmas Eve in London  —  Uber just completed its billionth trip  —  By most measures, Uber has had a pretty good year: numerous political victories, new product launches, and scary amounts of cash raised.  And the hits keep coming.
Om Malik / New Yorker:
In Silicon Valley Now, It's Almost Always Winner Takes All  —  In September, 2014, after investing in a ride-sharing company called Sidecar, Richard Branson declared that it was “early days and, like a lot of other commodity businesses, there is room for innovators on great customer experiences.”
The Local:
Apple agrees to pay €318M in taxes to close the investigation into €1B of undeclared profits by its Italian subsidiary, tax office confirms  —  Apple to pay €318m in tax owed to Italy  —  US tech giant Apple has agreed to pay €318 million in tax owed to Italy's inland revenue …
Sean Gallagher / Ars Technica:
Flawed Chrome extension forcibly installed by AVG antivirus software could have exposed browsing history and other personal data of 9M+ users, has been patched  —  Google slams AVG for exposing Chrome user data with “security” plugin  —  AVG AntiVirus “force-installed” Chrome plugin that left browsing data vulnerable.

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