Techmeme: Local police get metadata dumps from cellular providers, spoof towers using Stingray devices (USA Today)

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December 8, 2013, 9:50 PM

Top News

Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:

NSA morale down after Edward Snowden revelations, former U.S. officials say — Morale has taken a hit at the National Security Agency in the wake of controversy over the agency's surveillance activities, according to former officials who say they are dismayed that President Obama has not visited the agency to show his support.

More: emptywheel and Gawker. Tweets: @radleybalko, @ron_miller, @grady_booch, @manish_vij and @broodman

Janet Reitman / Rolling Stone:

Snowden and Greenwald: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets — How two alienated, angry geeks broke the story of the year — Early one morning last December, Glenn Greenwald opened his laptop, scanned through his e-mail, and made a decision that almost cost him the story of his life.

Tweets: @justinraimondo, @thomas_drake1 and @jaredbkeller

Tim Wu / The New Republic:

Binge-viewing was just the beginning. Netflix has a plan to rewire our entire culture — Given all the faces you see glued to computers, tablets, and cell phones, you might think that people watch much less television than they used to. You would be wrong.

More: Gigaom and VizWorld.com. Tweets: @vivwalt and @adamwestbrook

Stephen Gandel / Fortune:

How to bet against the bitcoin megabubble — One reason the virtual currency has been soaring could that figuring out how to profit from its fall is tough. — FORTUNE — Can you bet on the likely eventual bitcoin crash? — You bet. But it's an expensive trade.

More: Bloomberg. Tweets: @noupside and @bobmcmillan

USA Today:

Local police get metadata dumps from cellular providers, spoof towers using Stingray devices — Cellphone data spying: It's not just the NSA — Police maintain that cellphone data can help solve crimes, track fugitives or abducted children — or even foil a terror attack.

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @glennbeck, @thomas_drake1, @mattblaze, @pchopl, @csoghoian, @megangeuss, @onekade and @mattblaze

Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:

The Test Begins: Do Google Shopping & Other Shopping Search Engines Give You The Best Deals? — It sounds pretty damning. Two recent surveys suggest that Google Shopping isn't leading searchers to the best prices on products. But the surveys weren't well documented …

Thanks:@sidharthdassani

Joan E. Solsman / CNET:

How Intel TV failed — pay attention, Google and Apple — analysis Intel aspired to revolutionize cable and satellite with Web TV. Just because it failed doesn't mean Apple, Google, and the rest will too — but they're no closer to a happy ending. — Intel was set to revolutionize television.

Tweets: @jessicalessin and @trengriffin

Julie Bort / Business Insider:

The Sad Story Behind Yahoo's Latest Startup Acquisition: Ptch — On Wednesday we reported that Yahoo acquired a mobile app called Ptch and will shut it down in a month. — Business Insider has since learned from multiple sources that Yahoo paid $6.5 million for Ptch.

More: TechCrunch. Tweets: @karaswisher, @jyarow and @stevekovach

Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:

Verizon Is Acquiring Content Delivery Network EdgeCast For More Than $350 Million — Verizon is looking to get deeper into the content delivery business with the acquisition of Los Angeles-based CDN provider EdgeCast Networks, TechCrunch has heard. Owning EdgeCast, and combining …

Tim Worstall / Forbes:

German Patent Ruling Threatens Microsoft's Windows Phone Earnings From Android — In yet another round of the patent fights going on over smart phones we find that Microsoft has just been dealt a blow over the revenues it gains from Android hand sets. Yes, read that again …

More: FOSS Patents and Softpedia News. Tweets: @nileshk

Businessweek:

The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry: An Oral History — In 1984, Mike Lazaridis, an engineering student at the University of Waterloo, and Douglas Fregin, an engineering student at the University of Windsor, founded an electronics and computer science consulting company called Research In Motion, or RIM.

More: The Verge, Globe and Mail, The Huffington Post, CrackBerry.com, MobileSyrup.com, Daring Fireball, PhoneArena, BGR, Yahoo! News, Ubergizmo, HBR.org, AppleInsider, The Verge, PandoDaily and DisplayBlog. Tweets: @ritholtz

Christopher S. Stewart / Wall Street Journal:

Inside the Effort to Kill a Web Fraud ‘Botnet’ — Working With Law Enforcement, Team Cuts Off Servers for Zombie Computers — For months, investigators at Microsoft Corp. hunkered down in front of their computer monitors, patiently stalking the shadowy figures behind what the company says is a major Web ad-fraud machine.

More: Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check and Computerworld. Tweets: @microsoftdcu

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