Techmeme: Nine-year-old NSA website seeks to educate and recruit kids with cartoon characters, games (Michael S. Schmidt/New York Times)

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January 26, 2014, 10:01 AM

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Harry McCracken / TIME:

Exclusive: Watch Steve Jobs' First Demonstration of the Mac for the Public, Unseen Since 1984 — It's January, 1984. Steve Jobs, nattily attired in a double-breasted suit, is demonstrating Apple's breakthrough personal computer, Macintosh, before a packed room.

More: Gizmodo, 9to5Mac, Engadget, Business Insider, MacRumors, iClarified, iPhone in Canada Blog, iDownloadBlog.com, The Next Web, ZDNet and Digital Trends. Thanks:@mariedomingo

Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:

Michaels investigating possible “data security attack” after fraudulent credit card purchases lead back to its stores — Sources: Card Breach at Michaels Stores — Multiple sources in the banking industry say they are tracking a pattern of fraud on cards that were all recently used …

More: Ars Technica, Graham Cluley, Reuters, CNET, Computerworld, VentureBeat, New York Times, CNNMoney.com, The Verge, USA Today, SlashGear, usnews.nbcnews.com, eWeek, Wired and PC Magazine

Tweets: @abrams, @ldignan, @briankrebs and @briankrebs

ABC News:

Exclusive: Apple's Tim Cook on NSA, What's Next as Mac Turns 30 — While secrecy is part of the excitement at Apple headquarters in Silicon Valley — today marked 30 years since Steve Jobs told America via TV that something big was coming — CEO Tim Cook said secrecy in the form …

Matt Mullenweg:

How WordPress has embodied and benefited from the principles of open source — The Four Freedoms — Eleven months before the U.S. declared war on Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said “As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone.”

Tweets: @sacca and @codinghorror

Kevin Poulsen / Wired:

How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love — Chris McKinlay was folded — into a cramped fifth-floor cubicle in UCLA's math sciences building, lit by a single bulb and the glow from his monitor. It was 3 in the morning, the optimal time to squeeze cycles out of the supercomputer …

More: BuzzFeed, Business Insider, Gizmodo, The Verge and Lifehacker. Tweets: @moorehn

Jenna Wortham / NYT Bits:

For some, Twitter is becoming less about relevancy and more about one-liners — Valley of the Blahs: How Justin Bieber's Troubles Exposed Twitter's Achilles' Heel — At some point, Twitter and the rest of social media became less about wanting to share the news and more about wanting to be the news.

More: Haywire. Tweets: @mikeisaac, @raju, @laurengoode, @jsnell, @caseynewton, @pkafka, @gaberivera, @stevenlevy, @abrams and @juddlegum

Michael S. Schmidt / New York Times:

Nine-year-old NSA website seeks to educate and recruit kids with cartoon characters, games — On Children's Website, N.S.A. Puts a Furry, Smiley Face on Its Mission — WASHINGTON — The turtle wearing a hat backward, baggy jeans and purple sunglasses looks just like other cartoon characters …

More: Neowin and Your Anon News

Graham Smith / Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

King removes flash game from web in response to cloning allegations, denies infringing IP — Flash Developer Alleges King “Cloned” Their Game — Update 2: And there's now a statement from King.com on the subject, also at the end of the post. — Update: There's now a response from Matthew Cox …

More: Junkyard Sam, VentureBeat, PC Magazine, Kotaku, GamesIndustry International, The Pocket Gamer Podcast, Polygon, VentureBeat, Joystiq, SlashGear, Business Insider, Re/code, GamePolitics blogs, TechnologyTell, VG247, destructoid, Geek.com, Forbes and Daily Dot

Rolfe Winkler / Wall Street Journal:

Chromebooks accounted for 19% of U.S. K-12 mobile computer purchases in 2013 — Chromebooks Take Other Mobile PCs to School — The Inexpensive Laptops Grab Fifth of U.S. Educational Purchases — Chromebooks have come from nowhere to grab nearly a fifth of U.S. school purchases of mobile computers …

More: BGR, Digits and OStatic blogs

Greg Kumparak / TechCrunch:

App.net Launches Backer, A Bitcoin-Friendly Crowdfunding Engine For Individual Software Features — As the popularity of crowdfunding grows ever larger, an interesting new trend has started popping up: developers, curious if a new feature is worth adding to their products …

More: App.net and The Next Web

Tim Wu / Culture Desk:

Review: “The Internet's Own Boy”, a documentary on Aaron Swartz's life and death — The New Aaron Swartz Documentary at Sundance — “The Internet's Own Boy,” a documentary about the life and death of Aaron Swartz, premièred on Monday at the Sundance Film Festival, where it received a standing ovation.

More: Rolling Stone, Variety, The Verge and Mashable. Tweets: @knappb

Sam Biddle / Valleywag:

KPCB founder Tom Perkins compares “rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent” to Nazi war on Jews — Silicon Valley Legend Compares Techie Backlash to Nazi Rampage — Silicon Valley has never been known for its appreciation of subtleties.

Kim-Mai Cutler / TechCrunch:

Bay area tech companies should give back and promote good public policy in their community

More: Los Angeles Times, Anil Dash, Mercury News, Webomatica, ReadWrite and Vanity Fair

Tweets: @jasonkincaid, @kevinmarks, @stephenfleming, @stephenfleming, @martinsfp, @anildash and @sg

Benedict Evans:

As tech, media, and telecom collide, ignorance of any one sector leads to failures like Joost and WiMax — Ignorance — “However vast any person's basic reading may be, there still remain an enormous number of fundamental works that he has not read.” - Italo Calvino

Tweets: @nathanchubbard, @h4ryb, @stevesi, @minethatdata, @mccarthyryanj, @rubenharris, @jchengwsj and @soundboy. See also Mediagazer

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