Techmeme
September 16, 2013, 7:35 AM

Top News

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.
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 …
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.
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.
Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:
Apple Stores to show off iPhone 5s Touch ID feature using demo app  —  One of the cornerstone features of Apple's upcoming iPhone 5s is the Touch ID fingerprint scanning system.  The feature allows an iPhone 5s user to unlock their iPhone or authenticate iTunes/App Store/iBooks downloads …
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch:
Conduit, Worth $1.4BN, Merges With Email Giant Perion (Worth $153M)  —  Conduit, the Israeli-based browser-toolbar and mobile startup estimated to be worth some $1.4 billion, has confirmed it is merging with Perion Network.  Conduit's Client Connect business and Perion will combine in an all-stock transaction.
More: GeekTimeThanks:@mikebutcher
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Tumblr Inks Firehose Deal With DataSift To Tumble Further Into The World Of Big Media Advertising  —  When Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion earlier this year, Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer and CFO Ken Goldman both pointed out that advertising on the site (and revenues from those ads) …

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Josh Lowensohn / CNET: