Techmeme
September 13, 2013, 6:50 PM

Top News

Nick Wingfield / NYT Bits:
Microsoft execs were aware of an Android Lumia prototype before Nokia deal  —  Behind Microsoft Deal, the Specter of a Nokia Android Phone  —  SEATTLE — Before Microsoft reached a deal to buy Nokia's phone business, there was a possibility that Nokia could have switched its smartphones …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Nuclear options: Microsoft was testing Surface Phone while Nokia experimented with Android  —  Things might have turned out very differently  —  Microsoft and Nokia need each other more than you'd expect.  While Nokia was testing Android in a variety of different ways, Microsoft was busy experimenting with a Surface Phone.
Tweets: @zpower
AllThingsD:
Twitter's internal 2013 growth target was 400m users, sources say it now has 240m  —  Twitter User Growth Slower Than Internal Goals  —  Is Twitter growing fast enough?  —  This seems like an odd question to ask, since the company has just told the world it's getting ready to go public.
DealBook:
Bloomberg:
Kevin Poulsen / Wired:
FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack  —  It wasn't ever seriously in doubt, but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found …
More: Gizmodo.  Tweets: @csoghoian
Andrew Cunningham / Ars Technica:
Alex Colon / GigaOM:
Best Buy will trade you a free iPhone 5 for your old smartphone  —  Don't know what to do with your old Palm Pre?  If you were thinking about getting an iPhone you can bring it to Best Buy this weekend, where it'll take your old smartphone and give you an iPhone 5 in exchange.
More: GeekWire and PhoneArena
Roger Cheng / CNET:
ProPublica:
Government Standards Agency “Strongly” Suggests Dropping its Own Encryption Standard  —  Following revelations about the NSA's covert influence on computer security standards, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, announced earlier this week it is revisiting some of its encryption standards.
More: GigaOM and Softpedia News.  Tweets: @mkapor
Eliot Van Buskirk / Evolver.fm:
Twitter Releases Spotify App  —  Remember when Twitter bought We Are Hunted, whose creators then built Twitter's #music app, which was initially super popular in part due to its cool design and the fact that everybody uses Twitter, but then it ran into a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem?
Jack Clark / The Register:
Google swaps out MySQL, moves to MariaDB  —  'They're moving it all,' says MariaDB Foundation headman  —  Google is migrating its MySQL systems over to MariaDB, allowing the search company to get away from the Oracle-backed open source database.  —  The news came out at the Extra Large Database …
More: ZDNet and Computing.  Thanks:@mappingbabel

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Sarah McBride / Reuters:
Mark Maremont / Wall Street Journal: