Techmeme
September 16, 2013, 5:40 AM

Top News

Spiegel Online:
NSA Spies on International Payments  —  The United States' NSA intelligence agency is interested in international payments processed by companies including Visa, SPIEGEL has learned.  It has even set up its own financial database to track money flows through a “tailored access operations” division.
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
Netflix Uses Pirate Sites to Determine What Shows to Buy  —  Video streaming giant Netflix sees itself as one of the most prominent competitors to the many pirate sites that offer video content without owners' permission.  —  However, these pirate sites also offer Netflix valuable information …
Roger Cheng / CNET:
Sprint preps ‘One Up,’ its own early upgrade program  —  Sprint One Up allows customers to pay for their devices in monthly installments and upgrade after one year, CNET has learned.  —  Better late than never, Sprint is finally getting into the early upgrade game.
Thomas Schulz / Spiegel Online:
Google Translate Has Ambitious Goals for Machine Translation  —  Can the language barrier be breached?  Google certainly thinks so: Under the leadership of a computer scientist from Germany, the company is making progress toward a universal translation tool.  But competition is looming from Microsoft and Facebook.
Billy Gallagher / TechCrunch:
Silicon Valley Luminaries Got Grilled On The NSA At Disrupt, Here's How They Responded  —  On Monday, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington wrote that he would press the CEOs, VCs, and other Silicon Valley leaders who he was interviewing at TechCrunch Disrupt about the NSA scandal.
More: Forbes
George Hahn / Generic Maker:
Why the PhoneBloks phone will never happen  —  It's a physics issue.  Signals in modern devices are extremely high speed; the easiest and cheapest way to combat this is to bring components closer together.  For example, the wireless radios, RAM, and processor in all modern phones exist as one chip.
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
AT&T Threatens Persistent Pirates With Account Termination  —  After years of negotiating and planning the long-awaited U.S. “six-strikes” system finally went live in February.  —  The Copyright Alert System's main goal is to educate the public.  That is, informing people that their connection …
Lee Hutchinson / Ars Technica:
With 30 tuners and 30 TB of storage, SnapStream makes TiVos look like toys  —  A peek into SnapStream's lab at their Houston office, showing racks of SnapStream Enterprise Servers and disks.  —  When you're picking out a DVR for your home, there's a pretty short list of candidates …
More: GeekTonicTweets: @zittrain and @robpegoraro

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Josh Lowensohn / CNET: