Techmeme
October 16, 2013, 5:10 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).
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
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 …
Larry Dignan / ZDNet:
IBM's Q3 mixed, hardware business thumped  —  Summary: IBM's earnings were better than expected for the third quarter, but sales fell short.  The systems and technology division saw sales fall 19 percent from a year ago.  —  IBM delivered mixed third quarter results with earnings …
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
Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:
500 Startups Is Raising $100 Million For Its Third Early-Stage Investment Fund  —  “Always be raising.”  —  It's not a bad motto, and it's one that Dave McClure's 500 Startups seems to be taking to heart.  After all, it had just recently closed Fund I when an SEC filing dropped alerting us …
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.
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.

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Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Rachel King / ZDNet: