Techmeme: Pirate Party and Anti-Piracy Outfits Get Permission to Spy on File-Sharers (Andy/TorrentFreak)

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December 30, 2013, 8:35 AM

Top News

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

Tweets: @justincormack, @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, Gizmodo, The Verge, Ubergizmo, The Next Web, App Advice, 9to5Google, Engadget, VentureBeat, SlashGear, Cult of Mac, Android and Me, Softpedia News and AllThingsD

Tweets: @reformedbroker, @howardlindzon, @chris_covello and @scottthurm

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, BGR and SlashGear. Tweets: @zseward

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, Business Insider, Quartz and Forbes. Tweets: @zseward

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

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: @freakonometrics, @stephenmarche and @andrewyng

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

Andy / TorrentFreak:

Pirate Party and Anti-Piracy Outfits Get Permission to Spy on File-Sharers — On July 1 a new anti-piracy law was passed in Norway that allows file-sharing sites to be blocked by local ISPs at the domain level. — The legislation also allows any rightsholder or group to spy on file-sharers providing …

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: TechEye, Daring Fireball, AppleInsider, BestTechie, Ubergizmo, gHacks Technology News and OStatic blogs

Tweets: @alexia_tsotsis, @manxstef, @farshadnayeri, @charlesarthur and @naofumi

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

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 …

David Kravets / Wired:

Obama's NSA Phone Spying Reforms Might Make Things Worse — President Barack Obama turned heads just days before Christmas when he announced that he is “seriously” considering following the recommendations set forth by an advisory panel, which he appointed, that suggested a major overhaul …

More: The Switch and Gizmodo

Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:

If not the NSA, who should store the phone data?

More: CNET. Tweets: @glynmoody, @hfuhs, @csoghoian and @digiphile

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