Techmeme
April 13, 2012, 10:50 AM

Top News

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:
Apple Fires Back at the Feds, Amazon  —  Nearly two days after the Department of Justice filed antitrust charges against Apple and major book publishers, Apple is responding.  Here's comment from Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr: … Apple's response is similar to ones made by Penguin Group and MacMillan …
Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg / Wall Street Journal:
Barnes & Noble Hit Hard  —  Barnes & Noble Inc. bore the brunt of Wednesday's antitrust settlement between the U.S. government and three major book publishers, losing 6.4% of its market value on Thursday alone and tumbling 17% this month.  —  Those market worries reflected the broad sentiment …
Google:
Google Announces First Quarter 2012 Results and Proposal for New Class of Stock  —  Proposal Would Effectively Implement 2-for-1 Stock Split While Preserving Long-Term Governance Structure  —  Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2012.
Austin Carr / Fast Company:
Amazon Massively Inflates Its Streaming Library Size  —  Amazon counts individual episodes, not whole series, as “TV shows,” which makes its Prime streaming catalog seem 10 times bigger than it actually is.  —  Amazon boasts that it has “more than 17,000 movies and television shows” …
Richard Sale / ISSSource:
Stuxnet Loaded by Iran Double Agents  —  By Richard Sale  —  The Stuxnet virus that damaged Iran's nuclear program was implanted by an Israeli proxy — an Iranian, who used a corrupt “memory stick.32,” former and serving U.S. intelligence officials said.  —  In the continuing battle …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Fetchnotes Launches A Simple, Cloud-Based Note-Taking Service (That Twitter Users Will Love)  —  Fetchnotes is a promising, lightweight note-taking app for list makers and idea-havers which looks deceptively simple.  But that simplicity is actually one of Fetchnotes' key selling points.
Caroline Winter / Business Week:
Berlin Cracks the Startup Code  —  On a rainy day in March 2011, Ciarán O'Leary and two colleagues crammed into a Berlin taxi and raced for the station to catch a train back to Hamburg.  While snaking through the city streets, it hit him: Leaving Berlin was a bad idea.
Bobbie Johnson / GigaOM:
Marc Samwer out as Groupon's international boss  —  After enduring a torrid few months, Groupon has confirmed a shakeup of its international business, bringing in a new chief to oversee operations outside America.  —  Out goes Marc Samwer, the oldest of the three notorious Samwer brothers …
Audrey Watters / Inside Higher Ed:
Crowdfunding's Next Frontier: Academic Research?  —  Blog:  —  Hack (Higher) Education  —  Crowdfunding has become increasingly popular lately.  That is, those who are looking for funding for their various projects can now turn to the community at large, which makes small contributions …
Greg Sandoval / CNET:
U.S. tries to silence MegaUpload lawyers on issue of user data  —  The U.S. government says that some of MegaUpload's lawyers have a conflict that should exclude them from representing the cyberlocker service.  —  (Credit: Greg Sandoval/CNET)  —  ALEXANDRIA, Va.—The struggle for control …
Janko Roettgers / GigaOM:
Did Boxee only sell 200,000 boxes?  —  The total number of Boxee Box users is around 200,000, according to a tweet sent out by the company Wednesday.  The tweet also revealed that Boxee now has a total of 2 million users, if you include users of the discontinued PC client.
Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:
Apple is allowed (at long last) to intervene in Lodsys lawsuit against app developers  —  On June 9, 2011, Apple filed a motion to intervene in a lawsuit instigated by non-practicing entity Lodsys against various app developers.  Apple argued that it has a license to the patents Lodsys is asserting …
Matt Macari / The Verge:
Oracle thinks you can copyright a programming language, Google disagrees  —  Oracle's case against Google has evolved primarily into a copyright infringement suit over the past several months, and with the full trial scheduled to begin this coming Monday, the court is making an effort to get down to the nuts and bolts of copyright law.
More: Reuters
Bill Ray / The Register:
Emirates wedges national ID cards inside NFC phones  —  ID-by-handset to become norm after gov inks deal with Etisalat  —  The United Arab Emirates has signed up local operator Etisalat with a view to getting the national ID card embedded into mobile phones.
Ross Miller / The Verge:
Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight coming early May for $139 (hands-on pictures and video)  —  It was almost a complete surprise, barring some leaked early promotional material yesterday.  Today, Barnes & Noble has officially announced the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight …
Evelyn M. Rusli / DealBook:
The Instagram Deal: A Mark Zuckerberg Production  —  Mark Zuckerberg, the 27-year-old chief executive and co-founder of Facebook, does not usually play the role of deal maker.  —  But the social network's $1 billion purchase of Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service, was a Mark Zuckerberg production.
Jon Bruner / Mobile:
Will Data Monopolies Paralyze the Internet?  —  Tim O'Reilly spoke with me last week about Internet companies acquiring massive proprietary data sets.  “We're kind of heading toward data as a source of monopoly power in some cases,” he told me, comparing data to “Intel Inside” as a barrier to market entry.
Jordan Golson / MacRumors:
Apple Releases Java Update to Remove Flashback Malware  —  Apple just released Java for OS X 2012-003, an update to the Java implementation in OS X. The update removes “the most common variants of the Flashback malware.”  Interestingly the update disables the automatic execution of Java applets …

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