Techmeme: How a Purse Snatching Led to the Legal Justification for NSA Domestic Spying (David Kravets/Wired)

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October 3, 2013, 8:50 AM

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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.

More: The Next Web, Techdirt, The Verge, Gizmodo, VentureBeat, ZDNet, Engadget, SlashGear, The Hacker News, Ars Technica and GigaOM

Tweets: @declanm, @glynmoody, @ioerror, @ggreenwald, @nickmaher, @ashk4n, @csoghoian and @kaepora

New York Times:

Lavabit Founder Waged Privacy Fight as F.B.I. Pursued Snowden — DALLAS — One day last May, Ladar Levison returned home to find an F.B.I. agent's business card on his Dallas doorstep. So began a four-month tangle with law enforcement officials that would end with Mr. Levison's shutting …

More: Ladar Levison, The Atlantic Wire and Softpedia News

Tweets: @ejosephsnowden, @nicolepowers, @declanm and @pierre

Alex Hern / Guardian:

Lavabit founder raises $20,000 to fund court battle

More: Inquirer, Computerworld and Softpedia 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

More: Forbes, CoinDesk, Business Insider and SiliconANGLE. Tweets: @natexanderson

Hayley Tsukayama / Washington Post:

Silk Road's mastermind allegedly paid $80,000 for a hitman. The hitman was a cop.

More: Ars Technica, The Switch, Internet Evolution and Boing Boing

Joe Coscarelli / New York Magazine:

Meet Ross Ulbricht, the Man Charged With Running the ‘Amazon.com of Drugs,’ Silk Road

More: Business Insider, Forbes, Business Insider and Gawker

Tweets: @nickwingfield and @stefanjbecket

Will Oremus / Slate:

Ulbricht posted a question linking him to Silk Road under his real name on Stack Overflow

More: TIME, Business Insider, WebProNews and Network World. Tweets: @georgiecasey

Felix Salmon / Reuters:

FBI bust of Silk Road may in fact help legitimize Bitcoin by removing its shadiest aspect

More: SiliconANGLE, Businessweek, Zero Hedge and Daily Dot

Tweets: @adrianchen and @felixsalmon

Roger Cheng / CNET:

LG preps curved display smartphone, the G Flex — Samsung isn't the only company planning a smartphone with a curved display. LG will likely unveil the device in November, CNET has learned, although plans are not yet final. — Get ready for the LG G Flex.

More: The Droid Guy, The Verge, Engadget, stuff.tv, Unwired View, Android Authority, pocketnow.com, Gearburn, SlashGear, Softpedia News, The Next Web and Mashable

Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch:

Amazon's Smartphones Detailed: ‘Project Smith’ 3D Flagship Model And A Value Handset With FireOS — Amazon is in the process of developing two smartphones, one inexpensive model and one with a 3D eye-tracking interface, TechCrunch has learned. The details are somewhat sparse …

More: GigaOM, Digital Trends, The Verge, IntoMobile, Softpedia News, Gearburn, Gizmodo, PhoneArena, Pocket-lint, MobileSyrup.com and TechnoBuffalo

Tweets: @joshconstine and @panzer

Ina Fried / AllThingsD:

Aiming to Get Into Smaller Devices, Intel Announces Big Push Into Arduino — Intel's latest effort to expand beyond its PC roots involves reaching out to hobbyists. — At Maker Fair in Rome, the chipmaker is announcing plans to partner with open source hardware specialist Arduino.

More: PC World, VentureBeat, Engadget, Digits, ZDNet, The Verge and AnandTech

David Kravets / Wired:

How a Purse Snatching Led to the Legal Justification for NSA Domestic Spying — Photo: Courtesy of Philip Weiss Auctions — It began as an ordinary purse snatching. On an early Baltimore morning in 1976, a local street thug crouched alongside his green Monte Carlo, pretending to change a flat, biding his time.

More: Daily Dot. Tweets: @sarahjeong

Joe Mullin / Ars Technica:

Patent troll Lodsys chickens out, folds case rather than face Kaspersky Lab — In 2011, Lodsys seemed like it was working hard to earn the title of the nation's most-hated patent troll by sending threat letters to small developers. At the end of the day, it turns out that Lodsys is one tremulous troll.

More: Nota Bene, The Verge, Kaspersky Lab US and GigaOM

Tweets: @e_kaspersky and @robpegoraro

Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Lodsys settled for nothing with Kaspersky Lab to avoid a ruling on the merits of its claims

More: ZDNet, PC World and TechWeekEurope UK

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.

New York Times:

Social Networks in a Battle for the Second Screen — After “Breaking Bad” drew 10.3 million viewers to one of the most crowd-satisfying finales in television history on Sunday, Twitter and Facebook raced to tell the news media about the throngs who shared their instant reactions to the show on the social networks.

More: Marketing Land. Tweets: @dannysullivan, @abcmarkscott and @kirstinestewart. See also Mediagazer

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:

Casey Newton / The Verge:

Jukeboxing: Rdio brings free radio to mobile apps to stay in the ring against Spotify — Rdio is releasing a free version of its service today on iOS and Android, bringing personalized radio to non-paying users of its mobile apps for the first time. Free of advertising for now …

More: The Next Web, Engadget, 9to5Mac, Gizmodo, SlashGear, Mashable, Electronista and hypebot. See also Mediagazer

Ellis Hamburger / The Verge:

Snapchat introduces “Stories”, a rolling compilation of snaps from the last 24 hours — Snapchat's next big thing: ‘Stories’ that don't just disappear — The app that introduced ephemeral messages sets its sights on Facebook — Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel's hands are shaking as he points to his iPhone.

More: Snapchat, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Engadget, 9to5Mac, The Next Web, Softpedia News, The Atlantic Wire and App Advice. Tweets: @damienmulley

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.

More: The Verge, blogs.telegraph.co.uk, Softpedia News, Zero Hedge, Jerusalem Post, DEBKAfile … and Forbes

Tweets: @johndalytv, @nycjim, @jebboone, @draglikepull and @ggreenwald

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.

More: The Verge, SlashGear, Softpedia News, Gearburn, WinBeta, Lastest ITProPortal news, Eye on Windows and WebProNews. Thanks:@leokelion

Reed Albergotti / Wall Street Journal:

Facebook building a $120 million, 394-unit housing community near its offices — The Social Network Is Building a 394-Unit Housing Community Near Its Offices — Facebook Inc.'s sprawling campus in Menlo Park, Calif., is so full of cushy perks that some employees may never want to go home.

More: CNET, Palo Alto Online, ModBee.com, San Francisco Chronicle and Gizmodo

Tweets: @zseward, @drudge_report and @rsingel

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, Resolute.VC, Forbes and GigaOM. Tweets: @markginnebaugh. Thanks:@bobpatters

Timothy B. Lee / Washington Post:

As Comcast faces less competition, only its highest-paying broadband 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.

More: Tech Policy Daily and The Precursor Blog. Tweets: @elisewho

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