Top Items:
Josh Ong / AppleInsider:
Google Chairman Eric tells US senators Apple's Siri could pose ‘competitive threat’ — Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman and former chief executive, admitted to the U.S. Senate antitrust subcommittee that Apple's new Siri personal assistant technology is a “significant development” …
James Temple / San Francisco Chronicle:
Google lawyer: Why the patent system is broken — Google stands at the center of the escalating mobile patent wars, as the developer of the Android operating system that triggered scores of lawsuits and countersuits. — Depending on whom you ask, the company is either the high-minded adult …
Discussion:
CNET News, Ars Technica, The Verge, Louis Gray and Slashdot
Ellis Hamburger / Business Insider:
Firefox 8 Launches In Two Days, But Here's How To Get It NOW — Firefox 8 won't hit the presses until November 8, but as always, Mozilla has uploaded the final version to the web a couple days early. — gHacks spotted the files on Mozilla's FTP servers. — Firefox 8, which comes …
Discussion:
gHacks Technology News, Lifehacker, The Verge, Pulse2 and Techie Buzz
Evelyn M. Rusli / New York Times:
Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn Has Become the Go-To Guy of Tech — THEY come for his money. They come for his advice. They come — duh — for his connections. — But mostly they come, with all the élan of Dorothy on her way to Oz, for a chance at some face time with Reid G. Hoffman, the start-up whisperer of Silicon Valley.
Discussion:
GigaOM, @danprimack, @karaswisher, Business Insider, Pulse2 and @sacca
Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:
Instagram's Kevin Systrom On International Expansion, Instagram Video, Funding Rumors And More — With over 100K weekly downloads coming in just from China, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom had a lot to say during his TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing talk, tackling head-on the issue …
Discussion:
The Next Web, Business Insider, Pulse2, OmLinks, Gizmodo UK, The Next Web and Instagramers.com
Marc Bevand / Zorinaq:
1TB Hard Drive Prices up 180% in a Month — The Newegg price charts on Camelegg sum this up illustratively: — Thailand manufactures 25% of the world's hard drives, and the severe 2011 monsoon season floods affected some of its largest industrial parks, where many hard drive manufacturers …
Discussion:
Techie Buzz, New York Times, Pulse2 and Techie Insider
David Carr / New York Times:
Is the WikiLeaks Movement Fading? — IT appears all the more likely that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, will be extradited to Sweden to be questioned on allegations of sexual misconduct from two women. A British court's ruling last Wednesday that he could be extradited …
Discussion:
Economist
Chris Williams / The Republic:
Anoka-Hennepin teachers write their own online textbook, save district $175,000 — MINNEAPOLIS — The new textbooks in Michael Engelhaupt's statistics class at Blaine High School are kind of cheap and won't last long, but he doesn't mind. After all, he wrote them.
Brooks Barnes / New York Times:
Disney and YouTube Make a Video Deal — LOS ANGELES — Two powerful media companies, the Walt Disney Company and YouTube, are betting that a new partnership will help them surmount separate but equally worrisome hurdles as they each strive for greater Web dominance.
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
Major Usenet Provider Shuts Down Following Court Order — Two years ago BREIN, representing the movie and music industries, took News-Service.com (NSE) to court. — Although the name NSE might not ring a bell with many people, it is the largest usenet provider in Europe and has many high-profile resellers such as Usenext.
Vlad Savov / The Verge:
Best Buy UK stores to be shut down after a year of unprofitable operation — The Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph are reporting today that British phone retailer Carphone Warehouse is about to close down the 11 Best Buy stores it opened across the UK last year.
Discussion:
Pocket-lint, London Calling Blog, Neowin.net, Gizmodo UK and VG247
Tricia Duryee / AllThingsD:
O.co Shutters At Least Three Businesses as It Questions New Commerce Models — O.co has shut down three of its product categories, and a fourth is on hold, after some of its experiments over the past couple of years have not penciled out. — In July, the Salt Lake City-based company …
