Techmeme: The NSA's New Codebreakers — America's using front companies … (Matthew M. Aid/Foreign Policy)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

October 16, 2013, 3:25 PM

Top News

Patrick May / Mercury News:

Cupertino council clears huge Apple ‘spaceship’ campus for liftoff — CUPERTINO — Apple's (AAPL) proposed new spaceship-shaped headquarters got a super-charged blast-off Tuesday night when the Cupertino City Council voted unanimously to approve the 2.8-million-square-foot behemoth beside Interstate 280 …

Lorraine Luk / Wall Street Journal:

Apple Cuts iPhone 5C Orders — Move Raises Concerns About Demand, Pricing Strategy for Low-Cost Device — A customer looks at an Apple iPhone 5c at a store in Palo Alto, Calif., on Sept. 20. Bloomberg News — HONG KONG— Apple Inc. has notified its two assemblers for the low-cost iPhone 5C …

Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:

What comes next after Windows 8.1? — Summary: Microsoft's Windows 8.1 will be commercially available starting this week. What will Microsoft do for an encore on the Windows front? — Microsoft is making Windows 8.1 commercially available over the next day-plus (depending on your time zone).

More: BGR, GeekWire, PC World, BetaNews, WMPoweruser and WinBeta

Ellis Hamburger / The Verge:

Square Cash lets anyone with a debit card send money instantly over email — What if sending money was as simple as sending an email? — That's the premise of Square Cash, launching today for all debit card users in the US, using any email service. To use Square Cash …

Walter S. Mossberg / AllThingsD:

Square Cash is the quickest, simplest way to send money from your debit card to anyone else's — The Money Is in the Email — While you can buy a $500 iPad at Amazon.com with a single click, sending even small amounts of cash to a friend or relative is still often a tedious and slow task.

More: Sqaure, SiliconANGLE, Quartz, MobilePaymentsToday.com News, Softpedia News, Cult of Mac and Payments News. Tweets: @jack

Sarah Kessler / Fast Company:

Think You Can Live Offline Without Being Tracked? Here's What It Takes — Nico Sell, the cofounder of a secure communication app called Wickr, has appeared on television twice. Both times, she wore sunglasses to prevent viewers from getting a full picture of what she looks like.

More: GigaOM. Thanks:@_trendspotter

Blair Hanley Frank / GeekWire:

Watch out, Nike: Adidas announces smartwatch for runners, starting at $399 — SAN FRANCISCO - Another big shoe brand just joined Nike in the wearable technology race: Adidas. — At today's GigaOM Mobilize conference in San Francisco, Paul Gaudio, the Vice President in charge …

More: The Verge, SlashGear, GigaOM, Gizmodo, Engadget, iPhone in Canada Blog and Mashable

Dana Wollman / Engadget:

Lenovo intros the Miix2, its first 8-inch Windows 8.1 tablet; coming soon for $299 — Remember when we reviewed Acer's (sorta crappy) W3 tablet, and assured you it wouldn't be long before we saw more 8-inch Windows 8.1 tablets? Well, with that latest Windows update due out tomorrow …

More: Lenovo Newsroom, GigaOM, ZDNet, PC Magazine, The Verge, PC World, BetaNews, LAPTOP Magazine and Gotta Be Mobile

Ken Yeung / The Next Web:

LinkedIn brings its Work With Us job tool to mobile, launches iOS app to help recruiters manage candidates — LinkedIn today unveiled two new mobile products designed to help recruiters and job candidates better connect with one another and “increase productivity”.

More: Talent Blog, Official LinkedIn Blog, ZDNet and AllThingsD

Matthew M. Aid / Foreign Policy:

The NSA's New Codebreakers — America's using front companies, break-in artists, and hacktivists to spy on everyone — and only North Korea seems able to resist. — There was a time when the codebreakers of the National Security Agency actually took the lead in solving enemy encryption systems.

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @csoghoian

Timothy B. Lee / The Switch:

Many of the most-pirated movies aren't available for legitimate online purchase — Why does movie piracy persist after years of efforts to stamp it out? A new website called PiracyData.org suggests a simple explanation: people pirate movies because they don't have the option of paying for a legitimate copy online.

More: Techdirt, Technology Liberation Front, TorrentFreak, TechHive, DSLreports, Ars Technica, Plagiarism Today, Technology Liberation Front, SiliconANGLE, Wired.co.uk, SlashGear, Softpedia News, Gizmodo, Hillicon Valley, TorrentFreak, WebProNews, The Register and TechCrunch. Tweets: @binarybits

Brad Chacos / PC World:

Microsoft reveals Windows 8.1's mysterious Movie Maker app, other app improvements — Movie Moments, the proverbial white whale of Windows 8 apps, has finally been hauled into the light on the eve of Windows 8.1's release, courtesy of a Microsoft blog post that introduces the new app …

More: The Windows Blog, LiveSide.net, Windows Phone Central, The Verge, TechNet Blogs, WinBeta, BetaNews and Softpedia News. Tweets: @gaborfari

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Akamai: Half Of All Internet Connections Now At 4Mbps+, Safari Remains Most Used Mobile Browser Globally — The ITU has recently published figures noting 2.7 billion internet connections globally, and today Akamai has released some numbers pointing to how fast those connections actually are.

More: Inquirer, Akamai, Softpedia News, CNET, GigaOM, WebProNews and Bloomberg

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Telefonica Takes A Strategic Stake In Rhapsody, Will Bring Napster Into Latin America, Deeper Into Europe — In the allegro-paced race between music streaming providers to see who will be the first to achieve profitable scale, today Rhapsody got a significant leg up, courtesy of Telefonica.

More: VatorNews, VentureBeat, Guardian, Billboard and CNET. Thanks:@matthewsimms_. See also Mediagazer

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:

Intel says hardware bargains to multiply this fall: $99 tablets, $299 Haswell laptops, $349 2-in-1 hybrids — Nov. 12 - 13, 2013 — Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich said he expects bargains galore this holiday season as computermakers take advantage of the latest Intel Haswell and Bay Trail microprocessors.

More: CNET, Softpedia News, Geek.com, AllThingsD, bizjournals, Gotta Be Mobile, ZDNet, Inquirer, PC World, SlashGear, eWeek, ITworld.com and Engadget. Tweets: @lessien

Rachel King / ZDNet:

Twitter headed to New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ‘TWTR’ — Summary: The move to the NYSE is quite the contrast to Facebook's tumultuous public launch on the Nasdaq. — Twitter has filled in another blank as it goes through the legal process to become a publicly traded company.

Brenna Hillier / VG247:

Xbox Live Compute gives free cloud tech to all devs, including dedicated servers — Microsoft is making its Xbox One cloud servers free for all developers to use, including dedicated server support for all multiplayer games. — In an Xbox Newswire post, Xbox Live's lead program manager …

More: Xbox Wire, GamesIndustry International, Softpedia News, Shacknews Recent Articles, VentureBeat, Xbox Live's Major Nelson, Gotta Be Mobile, TechNet Blogs and destructoid

Emil Protalinski / The Next Web:

Google to retire Chrome support for Windows XP users in April 2015, a year after Microsoft stops updating the OS — Google today announced it will stop supporting Chrome on Windows XP in April 2015. This means the company will stop providing regular updates and security patches a year …

More: Google Chrome Blog, ZDNet, PC World, BetaNews, Engadget, CITEworld, The Verge, 9to5Google and Softpedia News

Brad Stone / Businessweek:

Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder — Inside the Internet juggernaut Amazon.com (AMZN), there's near constant pressure to perform. In dozens of interviews ranging over two years for my book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon …

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @pkedrosky

Ellis Hamburger / The Verge:

Aviate: an always-changing, intelligent home screen for Android — What if Google Now was made of the icons on your home screen? — “We want to connect people to personalized information at the moment it's useful,” reads the mission statement of Aviate, a replacement launcher for Android available today in private beta.

More: Engadget, IntoMobile, GigaOM, PandoDaily, PC World, MobileSyrup.com, The Next Web, TechCrunch, TIME and Gizmodo. Tweets: @starfire2258. Thanks:@dmfreeman

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:

Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.

Cape:

Most carriers track everything. Cape doesn't. — Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more. Switch today and get 29% off for life.

Equals:

Stop vibe coding analytics — Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards. Build once, iterate for years.

Zoho:

Pro tips: 5 ways to close WhatsApp leads in Zoho CRM — This is a guest post by Orkhan Jafarli, Growth PM at TimelinesAI.More buyers now reach out on WhatsApp before they ever fill out a form.

IDrive:

Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:

What Happens If AI Fails?, Subprime Data Center Crisis, How Bad Can SpaceX Get?

The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.

Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.

Hard Fork:

OpenAI Models Go Rogue + Kimi K3 Freakout + A.I. Superforecasting

The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.

Subscribe to Hard Fork.

The Talk Show With John Gruber:

'A Scam Held Together With Patriotism and Golden Paint', With Quinn Nelson

The director's commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.

Subscribe to The Talk Show With John Gruber.

The Upstarts Podcast:

Abridge's Shiv Rao: The Doctor Founder Taking On Microsoft In Healthcare AI

Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.

Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.

Great Chat:

Too big to laugh: how tech lost its sense of humor

A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.

Subscribe to Great Chat.

Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:

Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.

Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:25 PM ET, October 16, 2013.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.