Techmeme: Court documents show US threatened Yahoo with $250K/day fine in 2008 if it refused to participate in NSA's PRISM program (Craig Timberg/Washington Post)

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September 11, 2014, 11:50 PM

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Craig Timberg / Washington Post:

Court documents show US threatened Yahoo with $250K/day fine in 2008 if it refused to participate in NSA's PRISM program — U.S. threatened massive fine to force Yahoo to release data — The U.S. government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day in 2008 if it failed to comply …

Juli Clover / MacRumors:

iPhone 6 Pre-Orders to Kick off Tonight at 12:01 AM Pacific — Following Tuesday's announcement of both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus, Apple announced plans to begin taking pre-orders for the devices on Friday, September 12. — Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T will all begin accepting pre-orders …

More: Macworld, AppleInsider, SlashGear, Phones Review, The Techolic, TUAW, Cult of Mac, 9to5Mac and Benedict Evans

Jordan Kahn / 9to5Mac:

Apple's second wave of iPhone 6 sales starts Sept. 26 for long list of countries — When Apple announced its new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus models earlier this week, it only provided preorder and shipping info for a handful of initially launch countries. The company has now confirmed …

More: MacRumors, iPhone in Canada Blog, BGR and The Techolic

Max Eulenstein / Facebook:

Facebook will now show better News Feed ads using data users report on why they hid ads — News Feed FYI: Listening to People's Feedback to Show Better Ads — Every day, there are millions of ads that are eligible to be shown in News Feed from more than 1.5 million active advertisers on Facebook …

More: Engadget, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, TechCrunch, AllFacebook, The Next Web, Inside Facebook, ZDNet, The Verge, Marketing Land, Marketing Pilgrim and WebProNews

Ben Woods / The Next Web:

Chromebooks can now run some Android apps for the first time, including Evernote and Vine — We knew that Google planned to add support for running Android apps on Chromebooks since the company announced it back at Google I/O in June, but today we've had confirmation that the first Android apps …

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Leaked Windows 9 screens reveal virtual desktops, windowed “modern” apps, search button on taskbar, and more — Leaked Windows 9 screenshots reveal the future of the desktop — Leaked Windows 9 screenshots have surfaced previously, but this time we're getting a closer look …

Andrew Cunningham / Ars Technica:

Review: In its second generation, the Moto X becomes a true flagship — The new Moto X is a worthy successor to the original. — At the end of last year's Moto X review, we concluded that it wasn't a perfect phone. Still, we wanted to see where Motorola would be in a year, and …

More: ZDNet, The Verge, DisplayBlog, Engadget, Know Your Mobile, Ubergizmo and Business Insider

Clayton Jones / Official Google for Work Blog:

Google announces iOS Sync for Google Apps users for increased security on iPhones and iPads — Increasing security and productivity for iOS devices — Marvel and DC Comics, Star Wars and Star Trek, Emacs and VI—we all have our favorites. And then there's iOS and Android, each with dedicated fans.

More: ZDNet, Engadget, App Advice, VentureBeat, FierceMobileIT News, The Verge, The Next Web, 9to5Mac and Business Insider

Arik Hesseldahl / Re/code:

HP acquires cloud startup Eucalyptus, for under $100M according to sources; CEO Marten Mickos will lead HP's cloud unit — HP Tests the M&A Waters With Acquisition of Cloud Startup Eucalyptus — Hewlett-Packard took another step back into the mergers and acquisitions market …

More: New York Times, Gigaom, BetaNews, Eucalyptus, The Register, Eucalyptus Blogs, Mercury News, Data Center Knowledge, The New Stack, ZDNet, hp.com, The New Stack and VentureBeat

David Lieberman / Deadline:

Verizon CEO Says Its Internet TV Service Will Be Up By Mid-2015 And Will Include “Custom Channels” — CEO Lowell McAdam offered a few more details this morning about Verizon's plan to offer a TV-like service over the Internet, a market that Sony and Dish Network also hope to lead.

More: The Verge, BGR, Gizmodo, Hollywood Reporter, Reuters, SlashGear, TechSpot, Engadget, Gigaom, Ubergizmo, Tech Times, DSLreports and Electronista. See also Mediagazer

Roger Cheng / CNET:

HTC's smartwatch is alive and kicking, and due in early 2015 — CNET has learned that HTC still plans to enter the burgeoning wearables business despite speculation its watch was scratched. — LAS VEGAS — HTC still wants in on the wearables game, even after Apple made its big move.

More: Business Insider, GSMArena Blog, Phandroid, Gotta Be Mobile, Wearable World News, Pocketnow, Android Police, TechnoBuffalo, 9to5Google, PC World, SlashGear, Ubergizmo, GadgeTell, Android Authority, Droid Life, Android and Me and Android Central. Thanks:@jeskillings

Meg P. Bernhard / Harvard News:

Harvard's Introduction to Computer Science course attracts 818 students, up from 700 last year, the most in 30 years — CS50 Logs Record-Breaking Enrollment Numbers — Nearly 12 percent of Harvard College is enrolled in a single course, according to data released by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Registrar's Office on Wednesday.

More: Nextgov, Fortune and Business Insider. Tweets: @dabeard

Joshua Ho / AnandTech:

Hands On with USB Type C: Reversible USB Connectors — Today, the USB-IF brought me in to see the long-awaited USB Type C cables. We've written about this before, but for those that aren't familiar with this new USB spec, the USB Type C cable and USB 3.1 spec are designed with the future in mind.

Tweets: @hdmoore

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

Kevin Rose's New App Tiiny Lets You Share Little Photos That Disappear In 24 Hours — Digg, Milk, and Revision3 founder Kevin Rose recently left Google Ventures to start a new mobile development house called North, and now we have some details on the firm's first app, Tiiny, which will launch soon.

More: Uncrunched and The Next Web. Tweets: @samfbiddle and @soffes

Neil Hughes / AppleInsider:

Analyst who predicted sapphire displays for new iPhones reports displays missed the phones “by weeks” due to manufacturing issues — Analyst who cried sapphire takes another swing, despite whiffing on iPhone 6 predictions — A financial analyst focused almost exclusively …

More: iMore, Search Engine Land, Gotta Be Mobile, TechnoBuffalo, BGR, TUAW, iPhone in Canada Blog and Pocketnow

Harrison Weber / VentureBeat:

Dropbox received hundreds of data requests from law enforcement, only told 91 users about them — Above: Dropbox cofounder and CEO Drew Houston. — Dropbox announced its first six-month transparency report today, revealing 268 law enforcement requests “for user information” …

More: The Dropbox Blog, TechCrunch and ZDNet

Arik Hesseldahl / Re/code:

EMC Has No Plans to Sell VMware Stake — Shares of data storage and IT giant EMC rose by as much as one percent today after a report in the New York Post said the company was exploring the sale of its majority stake in cloud software firm VMware. — The trouble with the report is that it's not true.

More: New York Post, The Register, Tech Trader Daily, Reuters, Seeking Alpha, Business Insider, bizjournals, Tech Trader Daily, Fortune, Wall Street Journal and ZDNet

Dave Camp / Mozilla Hacks:

Firefox Add-on Enables Web Development Across Browsers and Devices — Developing across multiple browsers and devices is the main issue developers have when building applications. Wouldn't it be great to debug your app across desktop, Android and iOS with one tool?

More: TechCrunch, GitHub, Ars Technica and CNET

Joseph Keller / iMore:

Castro developer Supertop buys Unread RSS reader — Supertop, the developers behind podcast app Castro, have announced that they have acquired RSS reader Unread from Jared Sinclair. As Sinclair wrote earlier this year, being the independent, one-man development team has been difficult and unprofitable.

More: Supertop Blog and MacStories

Alistair Barr / Wall Street Journal:

Google acquires polling service Polar for Google+, will shut down service at end of the year — Google's Deal for Polar Shows it Has Not Given Up On Google+ — Google's social network Google+ has failed to catch Facebook, but the Web giant has not given up on the business entirely.

More: Re/code, LukeW, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, 9to5Google, VatorNews and Electronista

Toby Wolpe / ZDNet:

Jenkins is now sole focus for CloudBees as it drops PaaS and teams up with Pivotal — Summary: There'll be a 100 percent bump in the engineering resources CloudBees puts into the Jenkins tool now the firm has turned away from platform as a service. There will also be more partnerships like the one it's just signed with Pivotal.

More: VentureBeat, Gigaom, CloudBees, theWHIR.com, Network World, Talkin' Cloud, Forbes, cloudcomputing-news.net and CITEworld

Kyle Russell / TechCrunch:

Code.org Launches Code Studio, A Toolset And Curriculum For Teaching Kids Programming — Since its creation, Code.org's mission has been to get coding into curriculums for students as schools nationwide. Today, the nonprofit group is launching Code Studio, a combined set of tools and curriculum …

More: VentureBeat, ANYBODY CAN LEARN, GeekWire and EdSurge

Cade Metz / Wired:

Uber's Revenue Is 12 Times The Size of Lyft's, New Study Says — The bitter battle between Uber and Lyft isn't exactly a close fight. — According to new research that draws on credit and debit card transactions by 3.8 million Americans, Uber's revenue was about 12 times that of its rival between May 2013 and May 2014.

More: Fortune and Forbes

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