Techmeme: How Worried Should We Be About the Alleged RSA-NSA Scheming? (Matt Blaze/Wired)

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December 30, 2013, 7:45 AM

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Spiegel Online:

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.

Spiegel Online:

NSA has 50-page catalog of exploits and backdoors in devices from Cisco, Huawei, Dell, Juniper, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, and more — Catalog Reveals NSA Has Back Doors for Numerous Devices — After years of speculation that electronics can be accessed by intelligence agencies through …

More: Cisco Blog, Gigaom, The Verge, Softpedia News, Threatpost, Daily Dot, TechSpot, SiliconANGLE, Forbes, Ubergizmo, SlashGear, Digital Trends, SecurityWeek and Boing Boing

Tweets: @glynmoody and @declanm

Wall Street Journal:

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.

More: Telegraph, The Register, Gigaom, VatorNews, The Verge, Gizmodo, Ubergizmo, Softpedia News, The Next Web, App Advice, 9to5Google, Engadget, VentureBeat, SlashGear, Cult of Mac, Android and Me and AllThingsD

Tweets: @howardlindzon, @chris_covello and @scottthurm

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

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 …

More: CNET, Quartz and Forbes. Tweets: @zseward

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:

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.

More: Daring Fireball and BestTechie. Tweets: @alexia_tsotsis, @manxstef, @farshadnayeri, @charlesarthur and @naofumi

Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:

Chromebooks' success punches Microsoft in the gut

Jim Finkle / Reuters:

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.

More: BBC, TechEye, Gizmodo UK, Mashable and SlashGear. See also Mediagazer

Fred Wilson / A VC:

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 …

More: Skillcrush, Medium, TechCrunch, Licence to Roam and Valleywag

Tweets: @rachelsklar, @fakegrimlock, @hblodget, @semil, @shaig and @alexia

Min-Jeong Lee / Digits:

LG to Soon Unveil webOS-Powered TV — South Korea's LG Electronics Inc. will soon take the veils off a television model that will run on the “webOS” operating system, highlighting its ambition of creating a prominent operating system for so-called smart TVs.

More: The Verge and SlashGear. Tweets: @zseward

Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:

Uber, LeCab And Others Now Have To Wait 15 Minutes Before Picking You Up In France — At first, it was just an idea, but this bill is now very real — urban transportation services like Uber and LeCab will now have to wait 15 minutes in France before letting a customer in the car.

More: SlashGear and Forbes. Tweets: @loic, @brianp and @digiphile

John Markoff / New York Times:

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.

More: Forbes and VentureBeat. Tweets: @stephenmarche and @andrewyng

Matt Blaze / Wired:

How Worried Should We Be About the Alleged RSA-NSA Scheming? — A Reuters news story published a week ago raised disturbing questions about the relationship between the NSA and RSA Security (now a division of EMC), a prominent vendor of cryptographic technologies.

More: A Few Thoughts …

Paul Krugman:

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 …

More: Paul Krugman, Business Insider, Washington Center … and Forbes

Tweets: @d_seaman, @bobmcmillan, @fredwilson, @trengriffin, @mollywood, @jason and @binarybits

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