Techmeme: Viki Strikes Deal With Baidu to Bring Crowd-Translated Programming to China (Kara Swisher/AllThingsD)

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December 18, 2013, 10:00 PM

Top News

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 …

Brendan Sasso / @brendansasso:

Here's the report from the NSA review group: http://www.whitehouse.gov/...

Tweets: @ggreenwald

San Francisco Chronicle:

Obama won't give tech firms assurances on snooping

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.

More: SiliconBeat, Ars Technica, Forbes, MacRumors, AppleInsider, Business Insider, The Verge, CNET, Redmond Pie, BGR, iPhone Hacks, iDownloadBlog.com, MacNN, SlashGear, Engadget, Patently Apple, Cult of Mac, iPhone in Canada Blog and Yahoo! News. Tweets: @thegrugq

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.

More: Gigaom Research, PadGadget and iPhone in Canada Blog

Tweets: @karaswisher, @mikeisaac and @nycjim

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 …

More: NYT Bits, Wall Street Journal, The Verge, Forbes, Ars Technica, AllThingsD, Gotta Be Mobile and CNET. Tweets: @innismir

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.

More: TechCrunch, 9to5Google and TechHive

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.

More: SiliconBeat, oBlog, PandoDaily, ZDNet, Forbes, Elance Blog, VatorNews, NYT Bits, Bloomberg, Inc.com, VentureBeat, Business Wire and The Next Web. Tweets: @om

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 …

More: BestTechie, The Next Web, Cult of Mac, VentureBeat, PC Pro, Gizmodo and Electronista

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.

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.

More: CNET, The Verge, ZDNet, Telegraph and AllFacebook

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 …

More: The Verge, Xbox Wire, The Verge, Nokia Conversations, The Windows Blog, Windows Phone Central, Windows Phone Central, PC World, SuperSite for Windows, Softpedia News, Wpxbox, Gigaom, The Next Web, LiveSide.net, Gotta Be Mobile, WebProNews, WindowsObserver.com and Electronista

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.

More: IBM, VentureBeat, The Register, Forbes and ZDNet

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Amazon Raises Its Game Against Alibaba, Will Expand AWS Cloud Services To China In 2014

More: Amazon Web Services Blog, Wall Street Journal, The Register, TechWeekEurope UK, VentureBeat, Internet Evolution, GeekWire, Gigaom and ZDNet

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.

More: Engadget, The Next Web, Flickr Blog, Thomas Hawk Digital Connection and Off On A Tangent. Tweets: @benwerd

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 …

More: CNET

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.

More: eWeek, Computerworld, VentureBeat, Tech Trader Daily, Digits, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Gigaom and Business Insider

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

Use of Tor helped FBI ID suspect in bomb hoax case — It's true that the Tor anonymity service helps people cover their tracks on the Internet. But when it's not used carefully, it can be the very thing that tips off the people the user wants to evade, as was demonstrated in a federal investigation earlier this week.

More: On The Media, Schneier on Security, The Register, The Switch, NBCNews, Daily Dot, Forbes, ZDNet, The Verge and Business Insider

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:

Apple's New Mac Pro Goes On Sale Thursday Online And In Retail Starting At $2,999 — Apple has just announced that its new Mac Pro computer, featuring that signature ‘Darth Vader’ design, will be available for sale starting tomorrow, Thursday Dec. 19 beginning at $2,999.

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.

More: iDownloadBlog.com

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols / ZDNet:

Google joins Open Invention Network patent commons as a full member — Summary: Google joins IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony as a full member of the Open Invention Network open-source and Linux patent protection organization. — The Open Invention Network (OIN) …

More: CNET, 9to5Google, Google Open Source Blog, Softpedia News and OStatic blogs

Edgar Alvarez / Engadget:

Viber continues to expand as it rolls out Windows 8 app — Fresh off of the announcement that it's now allowing users to make calls to any mobile or landline number, Viber today is reaching yet another platform by way of a Windows 8 application. Aside from providing access to the VoIP calling services …

More: Gigaom, Softpedia News and Wpxbox

Liz Gannes / AllThingsD:

Big Money for Mobile Crowdsourced Transit App Moovit, With Sequoia Leading $28M Round — The notion that public transportation is a large and growing global opportunity for a tech company might seem a bit of a strange one. But, as Moovit co-founder and CEO Nir Erez sees it …

More: TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Android Community, Gigaom, PandoDaily, PE Hub Blog, Business Insider, The Next Web, VatorNews and Skift. Tweets: @sequoia_capital

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