NSA Tailored Access Operations unit specializes in “getting the ungettable”, intercepts hardware shipments to plant malware  —  The NSA Uses Powerful Toolbox in Effort to Spy on Global Networks  —  The NSA's TAO hacking unit is considered to be the intelligence agency's top secret weapon.

Chromebook Sales vs. Web Traffic Share  —  Gregg Keizer, reporting for Computerworld: … If these reports are right, we should soon see a corresponding surge in web traffic share for ChromeOS.  But I'm having trouble finding a web traffic source that even counts Chrome OS as an entity.

A core issue: young women are not embracing tech in key development years as often as men  —  Girls Who Code  —  I feel badly for Paul Graham because he's being made out to be something I am sure he is not.  But the brouhaha that he unleashed about women founders, women coders …

Google to partner with Audi for Android-based dashboards, will compete with iOS in the Car  —  Google, Apple Forge Auto Ties  —  Consumer Electronics Show to Spotlight In-Car Digital Race … Technology giants Google Inc. and Apple Inc. are about to expand their battle for digital supremacy to a new front: the automobile.

Facebook's Cutesy Annual Report To Partners Reveals First Country-By-Country Mobile Stats  —  TechCrunch has obtained never before published metrics showing Facebook's international growth.  Facebook sent some partners a playfully illustrated eMagazine called The Annual …

Qualcomm says its first commercial neuromorphic (brainlike) processor is coming in 2014  —  Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience  —  PALO ALTO, Calif. — Computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head.

New Law All but Bars Russian GPS Sites in U.S.  —  WASHINGTON — Tucked into the mammoth defense budget bill that President Obama signed into law on Thursday is a measure that virtually bars Russia from building about a half-dozen monitor stations on American soil that critics fear Moscow could use to spy on the United States or worse.

Exclusive: Hacker took over BBC server, tried to ‘sell’ access on Christmas Day  —  (Reuters) - A hacker secretly took over a computer server at the BBC, Britain's public broadcaster, and then launched a Christmas Day campaign to convince other cyber criminals to pay him for access to the system.

It's still unclear if Bitcoin can be a reasonably stable store of value  —  Bitcoin Is Evil  —  It's always important, and always hard, to distinguish positive economics — how things work — from normative economics — how things should be.  Indeed, on many of the macro issues I've written …

How Jesse Willms built an e-commerce operation the FTC says scammed consumers out of $467M  —  Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet  —  How one of the most notorious alleged hustlers in the history of e-commerce made a fortune on the Web  —  If you want to get a sense of Jesse Willms …

If not the NSA, who should store the phone data?  —  A measure that President Obama is considering as a way to curb the National Security Agency's mass storage of phone data is already facing resistance — not only from the intelligence community but also from privacy advocates, the phone industry and some lawmakers.