Techmeme
October 15, 2013, 8:30 AM

Top News

Washington Post:
NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally  —  The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials …
Apple:
Angela Ahrendts to Join Apple as Senior Vice President of Retail and Online Stores  —  Apple® today announced that Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, will be joining Apple in a newly created position, as a senior vice president and member of our executive team, reporting to CEO Tim Cook.
Seth Weintraub / 9to5Google:
Google Watch is happening soon, heavy into Kit Kat/Google Now functionality  —  I recently heard word that Google was putting the finishing touches on a Watch product.  Details are slim but the person seemed to think that Google Now functionality would be at the center of the product.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Twitter now lets you receive direct messages from any follower  —  Twitter is rolling out an option to ease the use of direct messages.  Traditionally, Twitter has allowed users who follow each other to send direct messages back and forth, or for users to send direct messages to accounts that follow them.
Matt Brian / Engadget:
Google readying ‘Mobile Meter’ app that offers rewards for tracking mobile usage  —  Google already knows better than most how we use the internet.  Now it wants to dig a little deeper and monitor your app usage as well.  Engadget has learned that the company is readying a new mobile service …
The Switch:
Yahoo Mail switching to HTTPS connections by default in January, four years after GMail  —  Yahoo to make SSL encryption the default for Webmail users.  Finally.  —  Beginning Jan. 8, Yahoo will enable encryption by default for users logging into its Web-based mail service, the company has told The Washington Post.
Mary Ellen Gordon / The Flurry Blog:
The South Korea Report: Device and App Trends in The First Saturated Device Market  —  In August of this year Flurry Analytics measured 33,527,534 active smartphones and tablets in South Korea.  While that was only 2.8% of the entire worldwide connected device installed base Flurry measures …
Jeff John Roberts / GigaOM:
A web page that lasts forever: the plan to stop “link rot” in law and science  —  Imagine a research library where most of the books are missing footnotes — where the bottom of the pages are stained or ripped out, making it impossible for scholars to tell the sources of information.
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
Thousands of Sites Hacked Via vBulletin Hole  —  Attackers appear to have compromised tens of thousands of Web sites using a security weakness in sites powered by the forum software vBulletin, security experts warn.  —  Attack tool for exploiting vulnerable vBulletin forums.
Adam Zeis / CrackBerry.com:
Message from BlackBerry: You can still count on us  —  The headlines for BlackBerry have been a bit of a jumbled mess lately, and for those BlackBerry users that don't dive deeper into the articles, things could seem a bit all over the place right now.  —  Tomorrow, October 15th …
Bloomberg:
Netflix Gets TiVo Assist in Push to Join Cable-TV Lineup  —  Netflix Inc. (NFLX), pressing cable operators to grant equal footing to its Web-based films and television shows on pay-TV systems, is getting an assist from set-top box maker TiVo Inc. (TIVO)  —  Netflix, the world's largest …
More: SlashGear
Mayumi Negishi / Wall Street Journal:
Sony, Microsoft Court Developers of Free-to-Play Titles for Its Consoles  —  Sony, Microsoft Court Developers of Free-to-Play Titles for Its Consoles Once seen as warring factions within the $66 billion videogame industry, advocates of the traditional console and free-to-play games are striking …
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates contributing tutorials to Code.org education initiative  —  After recruiting Will.i.am to help encourage students to explore the world of code, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates are preparing to take a more hands-on approach.

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