Apple beefs up iCloud, Apple ID security with two-step verification  —  Today, Apple has rolled out a new two-step verification service for iCloud and Apple ID users.  This functionality greatly enhances the security of Apple accounts because it requires users to use a trusted device and an extra security code.

Apple: Google Now hasn't been submitted to our App Store  —  The company has confirmed to CNET that the app was never brought to the App Store's submission service, despite Eric Schmidt indicating it might have been.  —  Google Now has not been submitted yet to Apple's App Store, the iPhone maker has confirmed to CNET.

Google chairman: Chrome, Android operating systems to stay separate  —  Google Inc's Chrome and Android operating systems will remain separate products but could have more overlap, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said, a week after the two came under a single boss.

Apple looks to protect dropped iPhones by shifting their orientation mid-flight  —  An Apple invention discovered on Thursday describes a system that could potentially save the most fragile components of an iPhone, such as the glass screen, by detecting when a device is falling and shifting …

Apple Design Teams Get Cozier  —  Last October Apple Inc. announced a management shake-up designed to increase collaboration across its different divisions.  Sure enough, some walls have come down, though many others remain.  —  One of the biggest areas of change has been design.

New OS X trojan injects ads into pages browsed by Chrome, Firefox, and Safari; even targets Apple's website  —  A new trojan specifically for Macs has been discovered that installs an adware plugin.  The malware attempts to monetize its attack by injecting ads into Chrome, Firefox, and Safari …

Celebrating #Twitter7  —  There's an old English saying, “Keep a thing seven years, and you'll always find a use for it.”  Today is Twitter's 7th birthday, which we observe on the day @jack first tweeted.  Since then, we've seen breathtaking velocity in Twitter's growth, which is due entirely to your many uses of it.

Google quietly pulls plug on Frommer's print travel guidebooks  —  The first edition of “Europe on $5 a Day” alongside “Frommer's Belize,” which is the last title in the series that has a cover image on Amazon.com.  —  » Get your daily dose of Skift: subscribe to our newsletter, RSS, Twitter or Facebook.

Strategy Analytics: iCloud, Dropbox and Amazon top cloud media in the US  —  We often focus on market share for hardware, but cloud media services increasingly dictate our lives after the devices have reached our bags and pockets.  Wouldn't it be nice to know who rules the online media landscape?

Sapphire Could Replace Gorilla Glass in the iPhone and other Smartphones  —  Your Next Smartphone Screen May Be Made of Sapphire  —  Manufactured sapphire is incredibly strong and scratch resistant.  Now falling costs and technology improvements could make it competitive with glass.  —  WHY IT MATTERS

Pandora now available on Windows Phone 8 with ad-free listening through the end of 2013  —  In October of last year, Microsoft pledged that Pandora would soon arrive on Windows Phone 8 and that when it did, WP8 users would be treated to a year of ad-free listening.

A Dongle Joke That Spiraled Way Out Of Control  —  In an age of blogs, tweets, Hacker News, Reddit and Anonymous, an off-the-cuff joke can spin wildly out of control.  —  At least it appears that's what happened with PyCon this week when a sexual joke led to some very public firings …

Apple data centers now 100 percent renewable-powered, but emissions rise 34 percent  —  Apple's data centers are 100 percent powered by renewable energy, and its corporate facilities are increasingly green, but a new report from the company shows that its greenhouse gas emissions actually increased by 34 percent in 2012.

Billionaire Google Board Member Is Latest Victim Of “Guccifer” Hacking Rampage  —  Buster  —  Add a billionaire Silicon Valley titan to the growing list of public figures victimized by the hacker “Guccifer.”  —  Venture capitalist John Doerr had his AOL account breached several days ago …

Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself  —  Google today launched Keep, an app that allows you to save things, clip stuff from the web, hoard notes and what not and put them all onto your Google Drive.  Yup, you guessed it — it is an imitation to Evernote and many other such applications.

An Open Letter to Google: Google Alerts Broken, Now Useless To Financial Marketers  —  For years, you maintained one of the simplest, most powerful tools on the internet: Google Alerts.  Anyone with a Google account could just sign in and create an email alert for any subject that interested them.

Zynga.com Makes Facebook Connect Optional As It Looks To Build An Independent Platform For Players And Developers  —  Last March, Zynga announced its ambitions to create a web and mobile platform for social games.  Zynga.com is a destination for both the company's own games …

Apple updates Podcasts app with custom stations, on-the-go playlists and less ‘skeuomorphic’ design  —  Apple has updated its much-maligned Podcasts app for iOS with custom iCloud-synced stations that update automatically when new episodes of those podcasts are posted.

Apple No 1 for 9th consecutive time for smartphone customer satisfaction  —  If there's one thing J.D. Power & Associates semi-annual report on customer satisfaction can agree upon, it's that Apple is - and has been for quite some time - the best in smartphone customer satisfaction.

Exclusive: Live demo of Fresh Paint app for Windows Blue, plus more Windows Blue mentions  —  After digging up a Microsoft job ad for Windows Blue and Windows Phone Blue from the Fresh Paint team recently, I've now stumbled upon the next best thing to having the actual app in-hand …

Defense spokesman says DoD not dumping BlackBerry  —  A U.S. Department of Defense spokesman on Thursday said a report suggesting the defense agency is dumping BlackBerry devices was inaccurate, and that BlackBerry is still part of ongoing DoD mobile device deployment plans.