Techmeme
October 3, 2013, 10:20 AM

Top News

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.
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.”
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.
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 …
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 …
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.
Tweets: @sarahjeong
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.
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.
Kim-Mai Cutler / TechCrunch:
Cue, The Startup Formerly Known As Greplin, Shuts Down Its App  —  Cue, the personal assistant app that grew out of a promising search product, has shut down.  —  The company left a brief note on their main page today, shown below. … The company was backed with at least $4.7 million …
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.
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.
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, Resolute.VC, Forbes and GigaOMTweets: @markginnebaughThanks:@bobpatters
Kaylene Hong / The Next Web:
Yahoo reveals a new vulnerability reporting policy with rewards of up to $15,000  —  Yahoo revealed today that it will dole out rewards of up to $15,000 (and starting from $150) to individuals and firms that inform the company of bugs and vulnerabilities classified as new, unique and/or high-risk issues …
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:

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