Techmeme
September 19, 2014, 8:05 AM

Top News

iFixit:
iPhone 6 Plus Teardown  —  Over the years, we've seen the iPhone evolve—and grow.  It began as just the iPhone.  Soon it learned how to 3G, it gained an S (it would lose and gain this every other year), and it even learned to read fingerprints.  Years of hard work and dedication …
iFixit:
iPhone 6 Teardown  —  Double the iPhone, double the teardown!  With the iPhone 6 Plus laid out for inspection, we turn our attention to the smaller iPhone 6—though at 4.7", it's still a giant among iPhones.  What was so big that Apple couldn't fit it into the familiar form factor?
Bloomberg:
Larry Ellison steps down as Oracle CEO, appointed CTO, chairman; Mark Hurd and Safra Catz now co-CEOs  —  Oracle's Ellison Steps Down as CEO, Replaced by Hurd and Catz  —  Oracle Corp.'s Larry Ellison stepped down as chief executive officer of the software maker he founded …
Craig Timberg / Washington Post:
Newest Androids will join iPhones in offering default encryption, blocking police  —  The next generation of Google's Android operating system, due for release next month, will encrypt data by default for the first time, the company said Thursday, raising yet another barrier to police gaining access …
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Microsoft cuts 747 employees in Washington state, 2,100 worldwide; closing Silicon Valley research lab  —  Microsoft to close Microsoft Research lab in Silicon Valley  —  Summary: Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley, with about 50 employees, is one of the casualties of Microsoft's latest round of 2,100 job cuts.
Catherine Mayer / TIME:
Bono says U2 and Apple working on new digital music format  —  Exclusive: U2 and Apple Have Another Surprise for You  —  The four members of the legendary Irish band tell TIME about another new album in the works—and its secret Apple project that might just save the music industry
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft's next version of Office includes a Clippy-like helper and a very dark theme  —  Microsoft is busy preparing a “Windows Technical Preview” for later this month, but the software maker is also privately testing an “Office Technical Preview” for the next version of its popular Office suite.
More: TechSpot and DailyTech
Sean Buckley / Engadget:
Nvidia unveils new flagship GeForce GTX 980 and 970 desktop GPUs based on Maxwell architecture  —  NVIDIA's latest GPU crams 4K images on 1080p displays  —  Back in February, NVIDIA trotted out the very first desktop GPUs to feature its new Maxwell architecture: the GeForce GTX 750 and 750i.
Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:
iOS 8 Adoption Off To A Slower Start Than iOS 7, Say Multiple Usage Trackers  —  The iOS 8 installation spike is high, but lower than it was for iOS 7 last year, according to numbers from a variety of mobile OS usage monitoring platforms.  Chitika, Tapjoy, Mixpanel and Appsee all show adoption numbers that …
Michael J. de la Merced / New York Times:
Alibaba Raises $21.8 Billion in Initial Public Offering  —  The Alibaba Group, the Chinese Internet juggernaut, will raise nearly $21.8 billion in its initial stock sale, people briefed on the matter said on Thursday, as investors flocked to buy a piece of the company that is poised …
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
Home Depot: 56M Cards Impacted, Malware Contained  —  Home Depot said today that cyber criminals armed with custom-built malware stole an estimated 56 million debit and credit card numbers from its customers between April and September 2014.  That disclosure officially makes the incident the largest retail card breach on record.
Ellen Huet / Forbes:
iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus come with anti-theft feature Activation Lock on by default  —  How Apple Made Your iPhone 6 Much Less Likely To Be Stolen  —  To you, your new iPhone 6 looks like a gleaming sheet of technological magic — but to a thief, it looks like a shiny, worthless brick.
Erich Owens / Facebook:
Facebook to place posts about trending topics and posts with fresh engagement higher in News Feed  —  News Feed FYI: Showing More Timely Stories from Friends and Pages  —  Our goal with News Feed is to show everyone the right content at the right time so they don't miss the stories that are important to them.
Drew FitzGerald / Wall Street Journal:
Apple Relied on Its Own Network for Part of the iOS 8 Upgrade  —  The roll-out of Apple 's new mobile-operating system Wednesday was the first time the company used its proprietary data distribution infrastructure, also called a content-delivery network, for such a large-scale deployment.
David Meyer / Gigaom:
Russia considering separation from global internet in ‘emergencies’, report says  —  A Friday report in Vedomosti suggests that, on 22 September, President Putin will meet with the country's security council to discuss the possibility of cutting out the foreign internet in times of strife.
John Cook / GeekWire:
SAP buying Concur Technologies for $8.3 billion  —  SAP is buying Bellevue-based Concur Technologies in deal valued at $8.3 billion, a 20 percent premium over the Sept. 17th closing price.  Founded in 1993, Concur successfully transformed itself into a software-as-a-service company …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
PayPal Here Arrives On Android Tablets  —  PayPal Here, the company's dongle-based mobile payments solution, is now available for Android tablets, the company announced this afternoon — a move that will address a large and growing swath of the tablet market.

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