Techmeme: No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A. (Scott Shane/New York Times)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

November 3, 2013, 12:45 AM

Top News

Scott Shane / New York Times:

No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A. — The N.S.A.'s Evolution: The National Security Agency was founded in 1952, and its surveillance capabilities were limited by legislation in 1978. But with the attacks of September 2001 came a new sense of urgency.

More: Guardian, CNET, Business Insider, Guardian, emptywheel and Guardian

Tweets: @zeynep, @joshuafoust, @jameeljaffer, @colvinius, @apblake, @dangillmor, @charlie_savage, @bcappelbaum, @csoghoian and @ggreenwald

Janko Roettgers / Gigaom:

Netflix starts testing 4K videos, wants to launch Ultra HD next year — Netflix quietly added a handful of 4K HD videos to its catalog this week to prepare itself for a wider launch of ultra high-definition video content in the coming months. So far, the titles added to the catalog …

More: The Verge, Digital Trends, Engadget, TechSpot, Mashable, Softpedia News, iClarified, DisplayBlog, SlashGear and T3 News. Tweets: @qthrul

Aileen Lee / TechCrunch:

Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups — Editor's note: Aileen Lee is founder of Cowboy Ventures, a seed-stage fund that backs entrepreneurs reinventing work and personal life through software. Previously, she joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1999 …

Tweets: @rabois, @shervin, @om, @semil, @carnage4life, @chamath and @trengriffin

Anand Lal Shimpi / AnandTech:

iPad Air Delivers 24 Hours of Battery Life as LTE Hotspot — A year ago during my review of the LTE iPad 3 I decided to find out how long the iPad would last as a personal hotspot. With the display off and a single notebook tethered wirelessly to the iPad downloading at a constant 50KB/s …

More: CNET, iPhone in Canada Blog, iPhone Hacks and Fierce CIO Tech Watch

David Grossman / The Verge:

YouTube Live: a disastrous spectacle Google would like you to forget — On the eve of its next attempt, has the company learned from its mistakes? — This Sunday, November 3rd, the world will experience the first annual YouTube Music Awards, hosted by Jason Schwartzman and streamed live from New York City.

Dave Itzkoff / New York Times:

YouTube Music Awards Are Readied for Webcast — “Does there really need to be another awards show?” Spike Jonze recently wondered aloud. “If there's going to be one, why?” — This was a reasonable sentiment that Mr. Jonze, the veteran director of music videos and feature films …

More: YouTube Blog

Richard Waters / Financial Times:

Bill Gates stands separate from peers with focus on disease over internet connectivity — An exclusive interview with Bill Gates — The internet is not going to save the world, says the Microsoft co-founder, whatever Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley's tech billionaires believe.

More: The Verge, Business Insider, Forbes, AllThingsD, The Atlantic Wire, T3 News, CNET and WebProNews

Anand Lal Shimpi / AnandTech:

Microsoft Surface Pro 2 Firmware Update Improves Battery Life — Shortly after general availability of the Surface Pro 2, Microsoft pushed out a firmware update that allowed the Marvell WiFi solution to drive down to even lower power states. I spoke with Microsoft after the update went live …

More: TechSpot, SlashGear, Windows Phone Central and WinBeta. Tweets: @codinghorror

Vlad Savov / The Verge:

Android 4.4 KitKat and Google's quest to take over the world — Can a low-end Android phone be any good? For Mountain View, a billion users are at stake — “As we get on our journey to reach the next billion people, we want to do it on the latest version of Android.” — Sundar Pichai

More: Forbes. Tweets: @carlfranzen

Cameron Graham / Technology Advice:

Why Amazon Fights State Sales Tax, But Supports It Nationally — Amazon will begin charging sales tax on goods purchased by customers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin today, after fighting such regulation for years. That brings the total number of states which require sales tax …

More: Digits

Jon Russell / The Next Web:

RIP iGoogle: Google's personalized Web portal service has now closed down — RIP another Google service: iGoogle, the company's personalized Web portal product, finally bit the dust today, some eight months after its shutdown was announced. — iGoogle has slipped into the darkness quietly …

More: The Switch, SlashGear, iGoogle Developer Blog, Engadget, TechnoBuffalo, VentureBeat, AllThingsD and Google Operating System. Tweets: @qthrul

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Machinima, the YouTube Giant Looking for New Money, Is Also Looking for a New CEO — Machinima, the giant YouTube network that caters to gamers, is looking for a new chief executive — at the same time it is trying to close a big funding round. — Allen DeBevoise, the company's co-founder …

More: Los Angeles Times, Variety, The Wrap, VideoInk, Gigaom Research and Tubefilter. Tweets: @pkafka

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 12:45 AM ET, November 3, 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.