| New York Times: |
Obama Panel Recommends New Limits on N.S.A. Spying — WASHINGTON — A panel of presidential advisers who reviewed the National Security Agency's surveillance practices urged President Obama on Wednesday to end the government's systematic collection of logs of all Americans' phone calls … | San Francisco Chronicle: |
Obama won't give tech firms assurances on snooping — Technology company executives left a meeting with President Obama this week with no commitment to limit government snooping on Internet traffic, according to an industry official briefed on the session. Warning of backlashMayer … | Brendan Sasso / @brendansasso: |
| The Switch: |
Research shows how MacBook Webcams can spy on their users without warning — The woman was shocked when she received two nude photos of herself by e-mail. The photos had been taken over a period of several months — without her knowledge — by the built-in camera on her laptop.| Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security: |
Sources: Target Investigating Data Breach — Nationwide retail giant Target is investigating a data breach potentially involving millions of customer credit and debit card records, multiple reliable sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. The sources said the breach appears to have begun … | Walter S. Mossberg / Wall Street Journal: |
Top Products in Two Decades of Tech Reviews — Walt Mossberg on the products that changed the digital industry — Remember the Apple Newton? How about Netscape? Even if these products did not last until the present, they left their mark in the evolution of personal technology.| Andy Greenberg / Forbes: |
Google Glass Face Recognition App Coming This Month, Whether Google Likes It Or Not — Since Google Glass first appeared, its potential for facial recognition has been seen either as a privacy nightmare or as one of the headset's first truly intriguing uses. Google has declared itself in the first camp.| Peter Kafka / AllThingsD: |
No One Buys Music on the Web Anymore. Except When They Buy a Million Beyonce Albums in Five Days. — Sales of music downloads, which were supposed to rescue the music business from the decline of the CD, have been flattening for a few years. Then things got worse: This year, digital sales were down 4 percent through Thanksgiving.| Aaron Souppouris / The Verge: |
Spotify brings a clean new look to the desktop — Spotify has started pushing out an update for its desktop client with a new aesthetic. We've tested out the refreshed app, and the starkest difference from the current version is a new darker theme; it's very dark, almost black in places … | Liz Gannes / AllThingsD: |
oDesk and Elance Merge to Create One Big Freelancer Company (But Still With Two Brands) — Elance and oDesk said today that they would merge. The companies have a lot in common — they both connect freelancers and gigs online — and they say they have a combined 10 million workers in 180 countries, with $750 million in 2013 billings.| Ron / WinBeta: |
Microsoft pulls Dec 2013 firmware update for Surface Pro 2 as troubles become widespread — On December 10th, Microsoft rolled out a firmware update for the Surface Pro 2. Immediately upon downloading that firmware update, numerous users began experiencing an error code (80070490) when attempting to install the update.| Ken Yeung / The Next Web: |
Twitter's Vine gets vanity URLs: sign-up starts Dec. 20 for verified accounts and Dec. 23 for all others — As a holiday treat, Twitter has announced that it will begin allowing Vine users to register for vanity URLs for their profiles. The race begins on Friday, December 20 at 9am PST … | Barb Darrow / Gigaom: |
It's official: China is the wild, wild west of cloud computing — Within hours of Amazon's announcement of a new Beijing region for Amazon Web Services, IBM jumped into the mix, announcing a new relationship with 21Vianet to offer high-end SmartCloud Enterprise + cloud services from a new 21Vianet-hosted facility in Beijing.| Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch: |
Yahoo Introduces New Style Of Flickr Embeds To Seed Content Outside Of The Site — Yahoo has introduced a new cleaner style of photo embeds today. Just about everyone has used content from Flickr in various ways at some point, especially from its great store of Creative Commons licensed images.| Jonathan Stempel / Reuters: |
Facebook, Zuckerberg, banks must face IPO lawsuit: judge — (Reuters) - A federal judge said Facebook Inc, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and dozens of banks must face a lawsuit accusing the social media company of misleading investors about its financial health before its $16 billion initial public offering last year.| Jon Fingas / Engadget: |
Microsoft releases standalone Xbox Music and Xbox Video apps for Windows Phone 8 — Microsoft appears to be taking a page from Google's approach to core software updates; it just launched standalone Xbox Music and Xbox Video apps for Windows Phone 8 users. The music app is largely … | Clare Jim / Reuters: |
China Mobile chairman says still in talks with Apple on iPhone deal — (Reuters) - China Mobile Ltd said it's still in talks with Apple Inc to sell iPhones amid mounting industry speculation that the pair are about to announce a deal to net the technology giant hundreds of millions of potential new customers.| Jon Bruner / O'Reilly Radar: |
Active Twitter accounts follow a median 117 users, 76% follow more people than follow them — Tweets loud and quiet — Writers who cover Twitter find the grandiose irresistible: nearly every article about the service's IPO this fall mentioned the heroes of the Arab Spring who toppled dictators … | Larry Dignan / ZDNet: |
Oracle's Q2 better than expected; Hardware sales stabilize — Summary: The bleeding in Oracle's hardware business appears to have stopped and execs tout cloud bookings momentum. — Oracle's second quarter results were better than expected and the company said software as a service bookings growth was 35 percent.| Dan Goodin / Ars Technica: |
| Jordan Novet / VentureBeat: |
Datameer picks up $19M to help companies do analytics along with Hadoop — In simplifying Hadoop — which takes an elephant as it mascot — Datameer is helping more people process and analyze data. — Hadoop, the leading framework used by companies to process huge amounts of data, has become all the rage right now.| Erin Griffith / PandoDaily: |
Boundless, the free textbook startup, settles lawsuit with publishers — Since before it even launched, textbook startup Boundless has been dealing with controversy. The company, backed by just under $10 million in venture funding, offers free versions of expensive textbooks to college students …
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.
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.
Stop vibe coding analytics — Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards. Build once, iterate for years.
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.
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.
This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:45 AM ET, December 19, 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.
| Zach Miners / PC World: |
| Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols / ZDNet: |
| Edgar Alvarez / Engadget: |
| Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch: |
| Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch: |
| Janko Roettgers / Gigaom: |
| Matt Burns / TechCrunch: |
| Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch: |