Techmeme: Is Marissa Mayer's Year-Old Employee Review System at Yahoo Finally Taking Aim at Underperformers? (Kara Swisher/AllThingsD)

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October 30, 2013, 7:45 PM

Top News

Washington Post:

NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say — The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden …

Andrea Peterson / The Switch:

PRISM already gave the NSA access to tech giants. Here's why it wanted more. — reveals that the NSA has been tapping into the primary communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world. That allowed the agency to collect metadata and content from hundreds …

More: PandoDaily, Washington Post, Business Insider, 9to5Google, New York Times, CNET, InfoWorld, ZDNet and Talking Points Memo. Tweets: @d_seaman

Mike Masnick / Techdirt:

NSA Issues Non-Denial Denial Of Infiltrating Google & Yahoo's Networks

More: Guardian

Facebook:

Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2013 Results — Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) today reported financial results for the third quarter, which ended September 30, 2013. — “For nearly ten years, Facebook has been on a mission to connect the world,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO.

More: Business Insider, Gigaom, Tech Trader Daily, TechHive, ZDNet, CNNMoney.com, Computerworld, AllFacebook, AllThingsD, New York Times, BGR, Marketing Land, Engadget, VentureBeat, Digits, ZDNet, AllThingsD, GeekWire, Forbes, WebProNews, Reuters and MobileSyrup.com

Tweets: @panzer, @hamburger, @jonerlichman, @tim, @nickbilton, @thestalwart, @hunterwalk and @benedictevans

Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch:

Facebook's Q3 '13 Beats With $2.02B Revenue, $0.25 EPS, With 49% Of Ad Revenue Now Via Mobile — No, Madam Secretary, Prices On Healthcare.gov Are Not A “Hypothetical Situation” — Facebook announced its Q3 2013 results today, posting $2.02B in revenue with earnings of $0.25 a share.

More: TechCrunch, VatorNews, ReadWrite, bizjournals, internetretailer.com and Electronista

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

Facebook Admits Some Decrease Of Usage Amongst Young Teens For The First Time — Facebook may be feeling the pinch from teen-focused mobile-first social networks like Snapchat, as CFO David Ebersman said on today's earnings call that Facebook “did see see a decrease in daily users specifically …

More: ReadWrite, CNET, Los Angeles Times, VatorNews, The Huffington Post and Mashable

Tweets: @joshconstine and @pkedrosky

Thanks:@chrisvelazco

Emil Protalinski / The Next Web:

Facebook passes 1.19 billion monthly active users, 874 million mobile users, and 728 million daily users

More: The Verge and BuzzFeed

John Poole / Primate Labs Blog:

iPad Air Geekbench: Over 80% faster than iPad 4, A7 processor 100MHz faster than iPhone 5s — iPad Air Benchmarks — Geekbench 3 results for the new iPad Air are starting to appear on the Geekbench Browser. I've charted the results for all iOS 7 capable iPads below.

More: AppleInsider, MacDailyNews, 9to5Mac, MacRumors, TUAW, PadGadget, TechnoBuffalo, ZDNet, Redmond Pie, AppleTell, BGR, Gotta Be Mobile and iDownloadBlog.com. Tweets: @fmanjoo

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:

iPad Air light enough to supplement a laptop, fast enough to replace one for most people

More: CNET, Telegraph, Guardian, TIME and SlashGear. Tweets: @stoweboyd

Matt McGee / Glass Almanac:

California Woman Gets the First Ticket for Driving with Google Glass — This is history: the first known case of a Glass Explorer getting a ticket for driving while wearing Google Glass. — Cecilia Abadie told her story on Google+ late Tuesday night, and shared this image of the citation …

More: Cecilia Abadie, Phandroid, GeekWire, Engadget, Forbes, CNN, CNET, Ars Technica, Betabeat, ABC News, The Switch, Wired, IntoMobile, Valleywag, Network World, 9to5Google, BuzzFeed, Cult of Mac, Consumerist, The Verge, AndroidHeadlines.com, The Atlantic Wire, Daily Dot, WebProNews, HotHardware.com News, SlashGear, Examiner, PC World and Gizmodo. Thanks:@mattmcgee

Steve Rosenbush / The CIO Report:

Facebook Tests Software to Track Your Cursor on Screen — Risk-based authentication solutions can help thwart cyber intruders' attempts to access enterprise systems. By learning users' expected log-in patterns, and by setting appropriate risk thresholds for various systems …

More: Ars Technica, AllFacebook, VentureBeat, CNET, Digits, Engadget, Consumerist, Ubergizmo, Gizmodo, Pocket-lint, Soshable, Valleywag, The Verge and The Raw Story. Tweets: @evelynrusli

AllThingsD:

Intel May Turn Over Its Web TV Project to Verizon — Intel's efforts to break into the TV business may be coming to a close. — Sources say the chipmaker is close to a deal to hand over control of Intel Media, the unit that has been trying to build a Web-based subscription TV service …

More: PC World, Ars Technica, CNET, The Verge, Reuters, Digits, Gigaom, eWeek, Forbes, Gizmodo, PC Magazine, Ubergizmo, TechSpot, Engadget, Electronista, VentureBeat and BGR. Tweets: @lessien. See also Mediagazer

Janko Roettgers / Gigaom:

Mozilla will add H.264 to Firefox as Cisco makes eleventh-hour push for WebRTC's future — Cisco staged a major coup Wednesday by announcing a new initiative that is meant to turn H.264 into the default codec for real-time communication on the web: the company open-sourced its H.246 codec implementation …

More: Cisco Blog, The Mozilla Blog, Brendan Eich, Engadget, The Next Web and InfoQ. Thanks:@jank0

Joanna Stern / ABC News:

Ashton Kutcher Ditches His iPhone, iPad in New Role as Lenovo Product Engineer … Alicia Keys has been the creative director of BlackBerry. Shakira was named T-Mobile collaborator last month. And now the latest celebrity tech hire? Ashton Kutcher is now a product engineer at Lenovo.

More: USA Today, PC Magazine, WebProNews, Bloomberg, TechSpot and 9to5Google

Tweets: @aplusk, @aplusk, @joannastern and @edbott

BBC:

Dell users: Latitude 6430u laptops ‘smell of cat urine’ — A number of Dell users have complained that their Latitude 6430u Ultrabooks “smell of cat urine”. — Dell engineers have ruled out biological contamination, and said the smell was not a health hazard.

More: Guardian, Engadget, Ars Technica, Examiner, CNET, PC Magazine, Mashable, Digital Trends, Inquirer, Geek.com, Smart News, ZDNet, Boing Boing, PC Pro and Consumerist

Kashmir Hill / Forbes:

Lavabit And Silent Circle Join Forces To Make All Email Surveillance-Proof — In recent months, Lavabit, based in Texas, and Silent Circle, based in Washington, D.C., both shuttered their encrypted email services. The companies said they couldn't keep them running knowing they were vulnerable …

More: Slate, Techdirt, Silent Circle Blog and SlashGear. Tweets: @glynmoody

Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:

Is Marissa Mayer's Year-Old Employee Review System at Yahoo Finally Taking Aim at Underperformers? — A little over a year ago, only a few months into her tenure, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer sent out an internal “goals” memo to employees that outlined a new system of evaluating the efficacy of its staff.

Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:

Sprint promises 60Mbps LTE today, demos gigabit cellular in the lab — Sprint today said it has demonstrated 1Gbps “over-the-air speed at its lab,” in an early preview of things to come. — The cellular company calls the technology “Sprint Spark.” Sprint claims that Spark …

More: AllThingsD, Sprint, Sprint, BGR, Faster, Digits, Computerworld, NVIDIA, AnandTech, iDownloadBlog.com, The Verge and Ubergizmo

Reuters:

Twitter hit with $124 million lawsuit over private stock sale — (Reuters) - Twitter Inc was sued for $124 million on Wednesday by two companies that said the social media darling defrauded it into pushing forward with a doomed private sale of its shares to stoke investor interest for its initial public offering.

More: AllThingsD, CNET, bizjournals and VentureBeat

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Neustar Buys Aggregate Knowledge, One of Facebook's Ad Tech Favorites, for $119 Million Cash — Neustar, which makes most of its money managing databases for phone companies, is buying Aggregate Knowledge, an analytics company best known recently for its work with Facebook.

More: AdExchanger, VentureBeat and Mashable

Roger Cheng / CNET:

Sprint swings to profit of $383M, but loses a net 313,000 customers — Sprint swung to a third-quarter profit its first period under new ownership. — The company, which reports for the first time after the completion of the SoftBank takeover and Clearwire acquisition …

More: Sprint Newsroom, MacRumors, The Verge, LAPTOP Magazine, Electronista, eWeek, AppleInsider, Gigaom, Bloomberg, DSLreports, TUAW, IntoMobile, 9to5Mac, iDownloadBlog.com, Reuters, BGR and Engadget

Taylor Soper / GeekWire:

World's first Bitcoin ATM sees 81 exchanges, $10,000 in transactions during first day — History was made in Bitcoin world on Tuesday when the world's first Bitcoin ATM opened in Vancouver, B.C. — At the Waves Coffee House in downtown Vancouver, 81 people made Bitcoin transactions that totaled $10,000.

More: CBC News, ABC News, SiliconANGLE, Reuters, TIME, ctvnews.ca, english.cri.cn and CoinDesk

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