Techmeme: Edward Snowden experiments with BeamPro telepresence robot to make appearances outside Russia (Andy Greenberg/Wired)

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June 16, 2014, 1:55 AM

Top News

New York Times:

Profile of Tim Cook describes him as projecting “quiet consideration” towards design, details his involvement in iWatch development, more — Tim Cook, Making Apple His Own — Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, was an adolescent boy in a small Alabama town in the early 1970s when he saw something he couldn't forget.

More: MacRumors, The Loop, The Verge, AppleInsider, iMore, MacDailyNews, TechnoBuffalo, Redmond Pie, TechCrunch, iPhone in Canada Blog, Gizmodo, CNET, Digital Trends, Cult of Mac, MobileSyrup.com, Fortune, Business Insider, App Advice and 9to5Mac

Tweets: @mikewehner, @glennf, @karaswisher, @glennf, @matthewkeyslive, @glennf, @lessien, @pakman, @jyarow, @ruskin147 and @sammywalrusiv

Adam Lashinsky / Fortune:

Tony Fadell reflects on his time at Apple, building Nest, and working at Google — Is Tony Fadell the next Steve Jobs or ... the next Larry Page? — At Apple he masterminded the iPod and was once seen as a potential CEO. Now the founder of Nest-which he recently sold to Google …

More: The Verge. Tweets: @blakeir, @tfadell, @jyarow, @salsop, @jyarow and @dujkan

Andy Greenberg / Wired:

Edward Snowden experiments with BeamPro telepresence robot to make appearances outside Russia — Inside Edward Snowden's Life as a Robot — Snowden appears via Beam bot in the ACLU's New York offices with (from left) journalist Laura Poitras, Freedom of the Press Foundation director Trevor Timm and security technologist Micah Lee.

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

Bitcoin security guarantee shattered by anonymous miner with 51% network power — In a first, one player got a monopoly of Bitcoin's total computational power. — For the first time in Bitcoin's five-year history, a single entity has repeatedly provided more than half …

More: TechCrunch, The Verge, Hacking, Distributed, CryptoCoinsNews and CryptoCoinsNews

Alexis C. Madrigal / The Atlantic Online:

Tech Isn't All Brogrammers, It's Still Nerds Building New Things — R. Stanley Williams works at HP Labs, and he has for a long time. In the video of him that I am watching, his pony tail flows out over his blue-collared shirt, and onto his lumpy sweater.

Tweets: @dtunkelang, @rands and @cdixon

Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch:

Behind the rise of The Wirecutter and This Is My Next, which simply tell you what to buy — Just Tell Me What To Buy — Yesterday, tech and culture website The Verge revived This Is My Next, a brand that the core team had used to transition away from their places at Engadget into their new home at Vox Media.

Tweets: @danackerman, @laurahazardowen, @mathewi and @nytfridge

Ben Popper / The Verge:

Tesla's plan to share its tech is bold, exciting, and a sign of weakness — Big bets are nothing new for CEO Elon Musk — “This is actually good for Tesla and EV industry, that's really important to appreciate, and I really do believe that,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on a call today.

More: AVC, Bloomberg, The Daily Beast, Tesla Motors, PC Magazine, Engadget, Gigaom and Associated Press. Tweets: @codeorg

Greg Miller / Washington Post:

U.S. officials scrambled to nab Snowden, hoping he would take a wrong step. He didn't. — While Edward Snowden was trapped in the transit zone of Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport last year, U.S. officials were confronting their own dearth of options in the White House Situation Room.

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @nicdawes, @ggreenwald, @sama, @jeffjarvis, @rj_gallagher and @andreisoldatov

Andy Weir / Neowin:

Leaked document reveals branding implications for Microsoft's Nokia acquisition — Microsoft's purchase of Nokia's devices business was completed back in May, but many questions have remained over the integration of the two. One of the biggest areas awaiting clarification has been that of branding …

More: @evleaks, VentureBeat, WMPoweruser, Ubergizmo, The Register, Softpedia News, DailyTech, Windows Phone Central, Tech-Thoughts, MobileSyrup.com and WinBeta

Rebecca Hiscott / Daily Dot:

Pic Nix, a service using a robot to post user-shaming Instagrams, has its account disabled — App that lets you anonymously shame Instagram users gets the axe—after one day — Last week, Pic Nix was the toast of the Web. Tech outlets spent a few glorious moments fawning …

More: Inside Mobile Apps, Pic Nix, CBS Philly, Engadget, Betabeat, The Verge and Pocket-lint

Carolyn Said / San Francisco Chronicle:

Window into Airbnb's hidden impact on S.F. — Thousands of San Franciscans have transformed their homes into impromptu inns using Airbnb, the website that lets people rent rooms or houses to travelers. These short-term rentals haven't been an easy sell to landlords, housing activists …

Tweets: @dtunkelang

Kaylene Hong / The Next Web:

Chat app Line rakes in $1.5m in just one month of users creating and selling their own stickers — Messaging app Line opened a marketplace in April that lets anyone create and sell their own stickers, with sales starting on May 8. Today it announced that the Line Creators Market has drawn …

More: LINE Corporation

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