Techmeme: NSA review group's report is an auspicious starting point for national discussion of reform (Elizabeth Goitein/Al Jazeera America)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

December 25, 2013, 1:55 AM

Top News

Reuters:

Exclusive: Target hackers stole encrypted bank PINs - source — (Reuters) - The hackers who attacked Target Corp (TGT.N) and compromised up to 40 million credit cards and debit cards also managed to steal encrypted personal identification numbers (PINs), according to a senior payments executive familiar with the situation.

More: TIME, CBS New York and TwinCities.com

Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:

Rescator.la, a major marketplace for cards stolen in Target hack, linked to Ukrainian man — Who's Selling Credit Cards from Target? — The previous two posts on this blog have featured stories about banks buying back credit and debit card accounts stolen in the Target hack and that ended …

More: The Verge, Computerworld, Business Insider, NYT Bits, Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch and WebProNews

Tweets: @briankrebs, @0xali and @mattbraga

Fox News:

Target warns customers of scams after massive data breach — Target is warning customers of phishing emails after more than 40 million credit and debit card accounts were stolen from the company during the holiday shopping season. — The retailer announced Tuesday that it has learned …

More: MarketWatch, Boston Herald, BankInfoSecurity and Target Pressroom

Nitasha Tiku / Valleywag:

Google's Investigating Rap Genius For Using Spammy SEO to Grow Traffic — How has Rap Genius distinguished itself all the other lyrics sites? With sweet, sweet old school spam techniques, or at Silicon Valley likes to call it “growth hacking.” The tactic is so shady that Matt Cutts …

More: jmarbach.com and VentureBeat. Tweets: @nitashatiku

Rap Genius:

Rap Genius apologizes for SEO tactics, asks Google to investigate whole lyrics search business — Open Letter to Google About Rap Genius SEO — On Rap Genius, userAnnotates and the artists themselves explore lyrics interactively via line-by-line annotations that they can read, create, and edit.

More: TechCrunch, SEO Book, Business Insider and Search Engine Land

Tweets: @melissatsang, @startupljackson and @bmilleare

Jeff John Roberts / Gigaom:

Google sues to protect Android device makers from Rockstar patent infringement suits — Google sues to protect Android device makers from Apple-backed patent hell — Google has filed a new lawsuit to challenge an Apple-backed consortium known as Rockstar that is using dubious patents …

More: Engadget, The Verge, SlashGear, BGR, VentureBeat, Electronista, Cult of Mac, iDownloadBlog.com, iPhone in Canada Blog and CNET. Tweets: @paulg

Jonathan Cheng / Wall Street Journal:

Samsung Phone Studied for Possible Security Gap — Israeli Researchers Point to Alleged Vulnerability in Galaxy S4 — SEOUL—The security platform for Samsung Electronics Co. 's best-selling Galaxy S4 smartphone suffers from a vulnerability that could allow malicious software to track emails …

More: SlashGear, Gizmodo, Business Insider, BerryReview, Los Angeles Times, BGR, pocketnow.com, Yahoo! News, iClarified, TechnoBuffalo, 9to5Google and Android Community

Elizabeth Goitein / Al Jazeera America:

NSA review group's report is an auspicious starting point for national discussion of reform — Bringing intelligence agencies to heel … It is rare for Congress or the federal courts to offer significant pushback against assertions of authority by the intelligence community.

Dennis Fisher / Threatpost:

Stanford Researchers Find Connecting Metadata With User Names is Simple

More: Web Policy, Digital Trends, DSLreports and TechEye

Jeff Bercovici / Forbes:

Justine Sacco And The Self-Inflicted Perils Of Twitter — A few weeks ago, I had a drink with my friend Justine Sacco and we talked about what makes for a good Tweet. — Justine is an easy person to like — frank, funny, quick to laugh. To a reporter, she's the kind of flack who's all too rare …

More: Salon, NYT Bits, CNN, msnbc.com, BuzzFeed, Mediaite, AdAge, Gigaom, The Wrap, Variety, Business Insider, PerezHilton, NPR, The Nation, The Huffington Post, The Technology Chronicles and memeburn

Tweets: @tcarmody, @adrianchen, @gregacaldwell, @mattbuchanan, @kashhill and @pkafka

Liana B. Baker / Reuters:

SoftBank gets closer to buying T-Mobile: report — (Reuters) - Japan-based SoftBank Corp (TYO:9984) is in final stages of talks with T-Mobile (TMUS.N)parent company Deutsche Telekom (DTE.DE)about acquiring the U.S.-based wireless carrier, the Nikkei news service reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous sources.

More: asia.nikkei.com, PC World, Engadget, The Verge, PhoneArena, TmoNews and Los Angeles Times. Tweets: @zpower

Brian X. Chen / NYT Bits:

U.S. Mobile Internet Traffic Nearly Doubled This Year — Two big shifts happened in the American cellphone industry over the past year: Cellular networks got faster, and smartphone screens got bigger. As a result, people's consumption of mobile data nearly doubled.

More: Always On Real-Time Access, BGR, MobileBurn.com, Los Angeles Times, DSLreports, TechHive, DSLreports and Business Insider. See also Mediagazer

Bloomberg:

Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies — Italy's Parliament today passed a new measure on web advertising, the so-called “Google tax,” which will require Italian companies to purchase their Internet ads from locally registered companies, instead of from units based in havens such as Ireland, Luxembourg and Bermuda.

More: Forbes, TheDomains.com and SlashGear. Tweets: @jessedrucker

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

Mozilla's Asm.js Gets Another Step Closer To Native Performance — Mozilla's asm.js is a strict subset of JavaScript that Firefox can run significantly faster than regular JavaScript code. Thanks to the so-called OdinMonkey module for Firefox's built-in JavaScript engine …

More: ZDNet, The Register, InfoWorld and OStatic blogs

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.

Cloudflare:

Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference — Stop preparing for agents. Start running them. 100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.

Zoho:

App Spotlight: Google Sheets Magic Lookup for Zoho CRM — Our App Spotlight brings you hand-picked apps to enhance the power of your Zoho apps and tools. Visit Zoho Marketplace to explore all apps, integrations …

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

Acquired:

Home Depot

Learn the playbooks that built the world's greatest companies - and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.

Subscribe to Acquired.

Big Technology Podcast:

Special Report: Will AI Wipe Out Humanity? (And Who Profits)

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.

Channels with Peter Kafka:

The Atlantic's CEO on AI, Billionaire Owners, and Moonlighting as a Creator

Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.

Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.

Sources:

Mark Zuckerberg on Muse, Meta's biggest AI bet yet

Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

Subscribe to Sources.

Lenny's Podcast:

How we built Grok Bot in a month | Roman Ugarte (SpaceXAI)

Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.

Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.

Invest Like the Best:

Walter Russell Mead - How America Keeps Winning

The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.

Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 1:55 AM ET, December 25, 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.