Techmeme: Silicon Valley Luminaries Got Grilled On The NSA At Disrupt, Here's How They Responded (Billy Gallagher/TechCrunch)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News

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.

More: Gizmodo, Forbes, Mashable, CannyVision, emptywheel, GigaOM and TechCrunch

Tweets: @csoghoian, @kgosztola, @rszbt, @davewiner and @jlllow

Joseph Menn / Reuters:

NSA revelations haven't measurably hurt business yet for major US tech companies — Analysis: Despite fears, NSA revelations helping U.S. tech industry — (Reuters) - Edward Snowden's unprecedented exposure of U.S. technology companies' close collaboration with national intelligence agencies …

Tweets: @ewenmacaskill, @bobmcmillan, @kgosztola and @matthew_d_green

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 …

More: Forbes, Softpedia News, CNET, The Verge, WebProNews, SlashGear, Electronista, Gizmodo, TechnoBuffalo and T3 News

Tweets: @codinghorror and @mindcrash

See also Mediagazer

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.

More: Digital Trends, App Advice, The Verge, iMore, Pocketables, Electronista, Ubergizmo, PhoneArena, Mashable and Engadget. Tweets: @qthrul

Carlo Rotella / New York Times:

Educators are cautious of reliance on tech as schools adopt tablets from News Corp's Amplify — No Child Left Untableted — Sally Hurd Smith, a veteran teacher, held up her brand-new tablet computer and shook it as she said, “I don't want this thing to take over my classroom.”

More: The Verge, dylan tweney, TechSpot and VentureBeat. Tweets: @ldignan. See also Mediagazer

Alexis Santos / Engadget:

Google Glass no longer requires tethering plan for smartphone data sharing — An Explorer Edition of Glass is already a pricey piece of tech, and smartphone tethering plans required to give it a mobile Internet connection have only made ownership that much more expensive.

More: The Next Web, Gearburn and Gizmodo. Tweets: @tim_stevens

Ben Sisario / New York Times:

Rdio to announce ad-supported free tier in partnership with radio operator Cumulus — Online Music Service Rdio in Deal With Cumulus — As radio broadcasters go digital and online music services try to stand out in a crowded market, both are finding ways to scratch each other's backs.

More: Gizmodo, The Verge, CNET, App Advice, Engadget and The Next Web

Tweets: @davidporter and @pkafka

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.

More: Softpedia News, Personanondata and BGR

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.

More: Daring Fireball, Stuff.co.nz and ExtremeTech

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 …

More: VentureBeat and Boing Boing

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: GeekTonic. Tweets: @zittrain and @robpegoraro

James Surowiecki / Currency:

The Virtues of Twitter's Confidential I.P.O. Filing — When Twitter announced yesterday afternoon (via tweet, naturally) that it was planning to file an I.P.O., the company said it had started the process by “confidentially” submitting an S-1 prospectus to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

More: Mashable, TIME, Forbes, social media and Wall Street Journal

Tweets: @danprimack, @karaswisher and @elizakern

New York Times:

At Twitter IPO, Williams, Sacca, USV, and Spark will each hold stakes likely exceeding $1B

More: GigaOM. Tweets: @dom, @scottkirsner, @mathewi and @davewiner. See also Mediagazer

Sponsor Posts

Soxton:

Fast, affordable law for startups — Soxton automates startup legal so founders can move faster and sleep better. We handle incorporation, advisor, employment and commercial contracts. Join the waitlist for early access!

F5:

Accelerate AI Adoption at F5's AI Virtual Summit — Learn how to architect, secure, and scale AI for production with real-world insights from industry leaders on June 23. Register now to save your spot.

Zoho:

Secure Connect in Zoho Assist: How MFA closes the credential gap in unattended access — Credentials get shared, borrowed, and sometimes compromised. For unattended remote access, where sessions happen outside business hours …

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.

Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

Grit:

Why 80% of the Fortune 100 Chose Qualtrics | Ryan Smith

Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.

Subscribe to Grit.

Lenny's Podcast:

The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga)

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.

Big Technology Podcast:

SpaceX's IPO Triumph, Anthropic's Fable Fumble, OpenAI's Price War

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.

Access:

A top iPhone app developer reacts to Apple's new Siri

A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.

Subscribe to Access.

Hard Fork:

'Hard Fork' Live, Part 1: Satya Nadella and Cindy Cohn

The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.

Subscribe to Hard Fork.

Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:

AI's Mythos Moment: Rishi Sunak on preparing governments for AI

Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.

Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 5:40 AM ET, September 16, 2013.

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.