Techmeme
January 29, 2012, 12:50 PM

Top News

Jennifer Granick / The Shout:
Megaupload: A Lot Less Guilty Than You Think  —  The recent Department of Justice decision to indict Megaupload for copyright infringement and related offenses raises some very thorny questions from a criminal law perspective.  A few preliminaries: I'm responsible for the musings below …
Enigmax / TorrentFreak:
Mega Aftermath: Upheaval In Pirate Warez Land  —  Despite its “rogue site” status and various other warnings, when MegaUpload went down last week it still came as a shock.  —  But what came next was unprecedented, a dramatic reaction in cyberlocker land that took out vast libraries of digital content and capacity.
More: rc3.org
Julie Bosman / New York Times:
Barnes & Noble, Taking On Amazon in the Fight of Its Life  —  IN March 2009, an eternity ago in Silicon Valley, a small team of engineers here was in a big hurry to rethink the future of books.  Not the paper-and-ink books that have been around since the days of Gutenberg …
Jolie O'Dell / VentureBeat:
Pass the popcorn: Y Combinator startup caught stealing from 37signals  —  Here's some developer drama for your Saturday morning: Curebit, a Y Combinator startup that just closed a round of funding from Dave McClure's 500 Startups fund, has been caught red-handed stealing HTML code, images, and the like from 37signals.
Mary Riddell / Telegraph:
Bill Gates: ‘I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying.  He kept it by his bed’  —  People's plutocrat Bill Gates talks about friendly rivalry, and how to get bankers to part with their money.  —  Change the world: 'If you have a dream and it comes true, it's a very cool thing,' says Bill Gates
Cade Metz / Wired Enterprise:
Google Reincarnates Dead Paper Mill as Data Center of Future  —  Google's Finland data center is the ultimate metaphor for the Internet Age (Photos: Google)  —  Joe Kava found himself on the southern coast of Finland, sending robotic cameras down an underground tunnel that stretched into the Baltic Sea.
Paul Sawers / The Next Web:
Brands may be paying celebrities for tweets, but who's paying Twitter?  —  It seems you can't even post a photo of yourself eating a chocolate bar on Twitter these days without kicking up a stink.  —  On Tuesday, Manchester United and (former?)  England defender Rio Ferdinand …
David Beren / TmoNews:
T-Mobile To Offer Additional Unlocked iPhone Support Beginning January 30th  —  Starting on January 30th, T-Mobile will “begin offering additional support to customers using an Apple iPhone on our network.”  T-Mobile's added iPhone support will include “common procedures …
Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:
Someone Finally Makes “S**t Silicon Valley Says”  —  After an onslaught of “S**t [blank] Says” videos in my Facebook Newsfeed, I appealed to Twitter yesterday, surprised that the industry that invented YouTube hadn't weighed in on the phenomenon.  —  Little did I know that husband …
Sarah Lacy / PandoDaily:
That Was Fast: Betaworks Returns All Capital... And Then Some  —  The New York tech scene has certainly received a lot of hype, but a lot of people are waiting for results that prove it's more than just that.  Proof that New York is really a tech ecosystem that is here to stay, no matter what may happen to Foursquare and Gilt.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
The 90-day recognition cliff: Why praise programs fade, and what keeps them alive  —  Recognition programs often start with enthusiasm.  Employees participate, managers share shoutouts, and teams have a new way to celebrate achievements.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
SAP CEO: AI Won't Kill Software, But It Will Change Your Job — With Christian Klein
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
David Ellison's Paramount-Warner Empire & The Fight That Comes Next
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Sources:
Factory CEO on why AGI is already here
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Invest Like the Best:
Noah Shinn - Building Instinct: The Personal Agent
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Lenny's Podcast:
The grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through the tech industry right now | Molly Graham
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Great Chat:
Doomers at Dreamforce
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:50 PM ET, January 29, 2012.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Reporters Without Borders:

Earlier Picks