Techmeme: North Korea denies hacking Sony but calls the breach a ‘righteous deed’ (Anna Fifield/Washington Post)

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December 7, 2014, 10:15 PM

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Anna Fifield / Washington Post:

North Korea denies hacking Sony but calls the breach a ‘righteous deed’ — TOKYO — North Korea has denied hacking Sony Pictures' computer systems in retaliation for its movie “The Interview,” which revolves around a plot to assassinate North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un.

More: New York Times, The Verge, PC Magazine, BBC, Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, Guardian, WSJ, NBC News, Re/code, Agence France-Presse, Gizmodo and Business Insider

Reuters:

North Korea's cyber war cell Bureau 121 employs 1800 hackers who are considered military elite

More: CNET, TechnoBuffalo, Wall Street Journal, Engadget and ZDNet. Tweets: @hg_masters

Malini Menon / Reuters:

Indian police arrest Uber driver who allegedly raped passenger, will take legal action against company for failing to run background checks — Uber cab driver in India arrested after suspected rape — (Reuters) - Indian police on Sunday arrested an Uber cab driver suspected of raping …

More: Uber Blog, TechCrunch, Uber Blog, CNET, Jezebel, Guardian, New York Times, Business Insider, VentureBeat, NDTV News, PandoDaily, Wall Street Journal, BBC, Quartz, PandoDaily and BuzzFeed. Tweets: @aaronwall

Jack Marshall / Wall Street Journal:

Google study finds 56.1% of display ad impressions it served never appeared on screen — 5 Viewability Findings From Google — Online marketers are increasingly opting to pay only for “viewable” ad impressions — those that actually display on users' screens, rather than ones that appear …

More: Think with Google, Quartz, CBS News, DoubleClick Advertiser, Forbes, BizReport, Research-live.com, Business Insider, ExchangeWire.com, The Drum and Marketing Land

Tweets: @jtemple, @sachinrekhi, @hoofnagle, @leeodden, @websterderek, @nngroup and @mdudas

Jason Hiner / TechRepublic:

Apple's first employee: The remarkable odyssey of Bill Fernandez — Perhaps best known as the guy who introduced Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Bill Fernandez speaks out on Apple's founding magic, how love built the first Mac, and the interface of the future. — The Apple II got there first.

More: iMore and MacRumors. Tweets: @starfire2258. Thanks:@jasonhiner

Michelle Jaworski / The Daily Dot:

Engineer builds machine to swipe right on Tinder non-stop — Leave it to a male engineer to make it infinitely easier to swipe right on Tinder. — YouTube user James Befurt set up a computer program and an elaborate mechanical apparatus ending in a robotic pointer finger that swipes right on every profile in Tinder.

More: YouTube, Jezebel, Death and Taxes, Mirror.co.uk and Business Insider

Seth Fiegerman / Mashable:

Aliens in the valley: The complete and chaotic history of Reddit — For months leading up to his resignation, Yishan Wong looked beat down. Employees say he was noticeably stressed and no longer enjoying his work. One business associate who stopped by the office in October thought Yishan …

Tweets: @cmdrtaco, @mashable, @sfiegerman and @mikeisaac. Thanks:@sfiegerman

Seth Weintraub / 9to5Mac:

Former Apple Supply Manager Paul Devine, convicted in 2011 of selling trade secrets to suppliers, sentenced to a year in prison and $4.5M fine — Former Apple Global Supply Manager Paul Devine sentenced to a year in prison and $4.5M fine — A former Apple Global Supply Manager was sentenced …

More: Mercury News, Associated Press and iMore

Matt Novak / Gizmodo:

FCC: smartphone theft a problem with 3.1M stolen in 2013, but new security measures helped — 59% of robberies in San Francisco involve the theft of a smartphone — Thefts involving smartphones are on the rise according to a new FCC study. In 2013, 3.1 million Americans had their smartphones stolen.

More: TechnoBuffalo, Cult of Mac, Washington Post and Consumerist

Carmel DeAmicis / Gigaom:

Secret struggles after clamping down on bullying; CEO teases dramatic revamp coming next week — What's happening with Secret? — Secret, the anonymous messaging app that captured the attention of Silicon Valley in the months after its January launch, is struggling.

More: PandoDaily. Tweets: @jyarow and @davidbyttow

Douglas Martin / New York Times:

Ralph H. Baer, Inventor of First System for Home Video Games, Is Dead at 92 — Ralph H. Baer, who turned television sets into electronic fantasy lands by inventing and patenting the first home video game system, died on Saturday at his home in Manchester, N.H. He was 92. — His death was confirmed by his family.

More: Gamasutra, The Verge, VentureBeat, Mashable, Ars Technica, Kotaku, Washington Post, IGN, Polygon, The A.V. Club, GameSpot, Xbox Live's Major Nelson and Joystiq

Vauhini Vara / New Yorker:

Freedom House report: Internet freedom declined in 36 of 65 countries studied this year — The World Cracks Down on the Internet — In September of last year, Chinese authorities announced an unorthodox standard to help them decide whether to punish people for posting online comments that are false …

More: Freedom House, Washington Post, Business Recorder, Sputnik, TodaysZaman, The Register, Trakin' the india …, American Journalism Review, Tom's Hardware Guide, U.S. News, Voice of America, Reason, RT and TechPresident

Tweets: @violetblue, @patrickbeuth, @conradhackett, @antonnewcombe and @paulwallbank

Scott Rosenberg / Backchannel:

Why tech giants create new programming languages, and how Go and Swift reflect their creators — My Computer Language is Better than Yours — Go and Swift take another step up the programming-language ladder … Google has Go, first conceived in 2009. Facebook introduced Hack last spring.

Tweets: @itod, @stevesi, @pedromelo, @joshuajberk, @mattcutts and @olivier_poitrey

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