Techmeme: Entering the Era of Private and Semi-Anonymous Apps (Nick Bilton/NYT Bits)

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February 9, 2014, 7:50 PM

Top News

New York Times:

Officials say Snowden used web crawling software to download classified NSA documents — Snowden Used Low-Cost Tool to Best N.S.A. — WASHINGTON — Intelligence officials investigating how Edward J. Snowden gained access to roughly a huge trove of the country's most highly classified documents …

More: TechCrunch, Guardian, TheHill, rc3.org, emptywheel, VentureBeat, TechSpot, Engadget, CNET, Examiner and Business Insider

Tweets: @mattlanger, @cdixon, @waxpancake, @mattblaze, @csoghoian, @marcoarment, @20committee, @johnolilly, @jpbarlow, @csoghoian, @free_snowden and @csoghoian

Arnold Kim / MacRumors:

‘Flappy Bird’ Removed from App Store by Developer — As promised, Dong Nguyen, the developer of Flappy Bird, has removed the popular game from the App Store. Flappy Bird has been the number one downloaded free app on Apple's App Store for almost a month. The game was generating $50,000/day in revenue from in-app ads.

Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:

Apple currently plans to release iOS 7.1 in March — While recent reports are pegging a launch sooner than later, reliable sources say that Apple is currently planning to ship iOS 7.1, the first significant update to iOS 7, in March. The iOS 7.1 update is said to not have any “secret features …

More: PC Magazine, PhoneArena, I4U News, IntoMobile, ReadWrite, VentureBeat, Phones Review, Business Insider, Jailbreak 7.0.4 iOS Evasion, The Verge, AppleTell, PadGadget, PFhub.com ™, Pocketnow and iPhone in Canada Blog

The Verge:

The coin prince: inside Bitcoin's first big money-laundering scandal — What last week's arrest of Charlie Shrem means for the virtual currency — A week ago, 24-year-old Charlie Shrem landed at JFK, home from giving a talk about the virtual currency Bitcoin at an e-commerce convention in Amsterdam.

More: Business Insider, Krebs on Security and Salon

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Windows Phone 8.1 Notification Center revealed in leaked screenshots — Microsoft is currently preparing its first major update to Windows Phone 8. A highly requested Notification Center feature will be included with Windows Phone 8.1, allowing users to customize and control their app notifications.

More: Windows Phone Central, VentureBeat, WMPoweruser, Softpedia News, Digital Trends, Shoutpedia, WinBeta, T3 News, Pocketnow, BGR India, PhoneNews.com and Pocket-lint

Peter Bright / Ars Technica:

Neither Microsoft, Nokia, nor anyone else should fork Android. It's unforkable. — As happens from time to time, the suggestion has been made that Microsoft cancel Windows Phone, and instead fork Android. It's not the first time this suggestion has been made. It's probably not the last, either.

More: Guardian, Tim Anderson, WinBeta, WMPoweruser and All New Musings

Tweets: @seyitaylor, @charlesarthur, @monkbent, @monkbent and @benedictevans

Nick Bilton / NYT Bits:

Entering the Era of Private and Semi-Anonymous Apps — Today's Web-enabled gadgets should come with a digital Miranda warning. “Anything you say or do online, from a status update to a selfie, can and will be used as evidence against you on the Internet.”

More: TechCrunch, StartupBook, Laughing Squid and Yahoo Tech. Tweets: @om

Ellis Hamburger / The Verge:

Nicholas Felton, designer of Facebook's Timeline, releases Reporter app to privately track your life through simple surveys — Reporter for iPhone tracks your whole life, one quiz at a time — Chart wizard Nicholas Felton's new app lets anyone live the quantified life

More: Engadget, Refinery29, Re/code and Uncrate

Quentin Hardy / NYT Bits:

Quora is likely to “put ads with its answers” in 2015 to capitalize on evergreen traffic — Quora and the Search for Truth — The Internet has a nagging problem: There is lots of information, but often confusion about what's true. Many big websites try to solve this problem with their services.

Tweets: @qhardy

Nicholas Carlson / Business Insider:

How Milo founder Jack Abraham and a small team designed eBay's new feed in two weeks — You Can Explain eBay's $50 Billion Turnaround With Just This One Crazy Story — Back in the middle of the last decade, eBay, the massive auction site, was in trouble.

More: Conversation Agent. Tweets: @gleitz, @mokoyfman, @samshank, @jackabraham, @pierre, @semil, @hunterwalk and @anildash

Ben Popper / The Verge:

Carl Icahn 2.0: an icon of '80s greed is back to shake up Silicon Valley — The wild success and massive cash hoards of today's technology firms are perfect targets for this activist investor — For techies scanning the headlines over the past few months, one name has become …

More: Fortune. Tweets: @davewiner

Mike Isaac / Re/code:

Twitter's Other Growth Problem: Keeping the Users It Already Has — Yes, Twitter has a growth problem. But more than that, the company has another headache: Getting people to stick around after signing up. — According to people close to the company, Twitter has seen more than one billion registrations …

More: Wall Street Journal. Tweets: @scobleizer and @spencerchen

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