Techmeme
October 3, 2013, 4:40 AM

Top News

Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
Feds Take Down Online Fraud Bazaar ‘Silk Road’, Arrest Alleged Mastermind  —  Defendant Charged With Drug Trafficking, Hacking, Money Laundering  —  Prosecutors in New York today said that federal agencies have taken over the Silk Road, a sprawling underground Web site that has earned infamy as the “eBay of drugs.”
Ars Technica:
How the feds took down the Dread Pirate Roberts  —  What he wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak.  —  The Dread Pirate Roberts, head of the most brazen drug trafficking site in the world, was a walking contradiction.  Though the government says he raked in $80 million in commissions from running Silk Road …
Adrianne Jeffries / The Verge:
Kevin Poulsen / Wired:
Edward Snowden's E-Mail Provider Defied FBI Demands to Turn Over Crypto Keys, Documents Show  —  The U.S. government obtained a secret court order demanding that Edward Snowden's e-mail provider, Lavabit, turn over its private SSL key, which would have allowed the FBI to wiretap the service's users.
AnandTech:
They're (Almost) All Dirty: The State of Cheating in Android Benchmarks  —  Thanks to AndreiF7's excellent work on discovering it, we kicked off our investigations into Samsung's CPU/GPU optimizations around the international Galaxy S 4 in July and came away with a couple of conclusions:
Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Lodsys settled for nothing with Kaspersky Lab to avoid a ruling on the merits of its claims  —  Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial  —  Today we learned just how determined the patent troll Lodsys is to avoid a ruling on the merits of its claims.
More: ZDNet and PC World
Leo Kelion / BBC:
Microsoft returns to CES Las Vegas tech show  —  Microsoft used to have one of the biggest stands at CES, but China's Hisense took much of the space in 2013  —  The organiser of the US's biggest tech show has revealed to the BBC that Microsoft is returning to the event.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Google Acquires YC-Backed Flutter, A Gesture Recognition Technology Startup  —  Google's Glass, Android and other products may soon be picking up more Kinect-style gesture features: the company has bought Flutter, a Y Combinator-backed startup that focuses on gesture recognition technology.
Timothy B. Lee / Washington Post:
As Comcast faces less competition, only its highest-paying customers get big speed increases  —  These charts show Comcast acting more and more like a monopolist  —  In a recent article, I suggested that broadband speeds were stagnating in the United States.  Comcast, the nation's leading broadband provider, begs to differ.
Damien McElroy / Telegraph:
Iranian cyber warfare commander shot dead in suspected assassination  —  The head of Iran's cyber warfare programme has been shot dead, triggering further accusations that outside powers are carrying out targeted assassinations of key figures in the country's security apparatus.
Klint Finley / Wired:
Runnable launches, lets developers find, edit, and even run code snippets on its site  —  Ex-Amazon Engineer Builds Library for World's Software Code  —  In 2004, Amazon.com boss Jeff Bezos decreed that any software built by an Amazon engineer must be shared with every other engineer at the company.
More: TechCrunch, GigaOM and Forbes.  Tweets: @markginnebaugh.  Thanks:@bobpatters
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Dell unveils first four Venue tablets, including a Microsoft Surface competitor  —  HP isn't the only beleaguered PC manufacturer unleashing a tablet blitz.  Today, Dell is revealing a full product lineup of new tablets under the recently resurrected Venue brand.

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Earlier Picks

Kyle Orland / Ars Technica: