Techmeme
December 27, 2014, 2:35 PM

Top News

Jack Kim / Reuters:
North Korea blames U.S. for Internet outages, calls Obama a ‘monkey’  —  (Reuters) - North Korea called U.S. President Barack Obama a “monkey” as it blamed Washington Saturday for Internet outages that it has experienced amid a confrontation with the United States over the hacking of the film studio Sony Pictures.
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
The Interview sees over 1.5M estimated torrent downloads in first two days of availability, comparable to popular blockbusters  —  The Interview Is A Pirate Hit With 200k Downloads (Updated)  —  Facing a “terrorist” threat theaters all around the U.S. backed away from showing The Interview last week.
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
Tor network flooded with new relays by Lizard Squad, group allegedly behind Xbox Live and PSN attacks  —  Hackers allegedly behind Xbox and PlayStation network shutdown set sights on Tor  —  The group that allegedly took down Microsoft and Sony's gaming networks now says it's set its sights on a new target.
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
The Open Bay helps launch 372 ‘copies’ of The Pirate Bay in a week, becomes GitHub's most popular project  —  isoHunt, the group now best known for launching The Old Pirate Bay, has shared an update a week after debuting The Open Bay.  The Pirate Bay, the most popular file sharing website on the planet …
More: TorrentFreakThanks:@epro
Paul Graham:
Immigration reform is crucial to keeping the US a tech superpower, as 95% of great programmers reside outside the US  —  Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In  —  American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US.
David Lerman / Bloomberg:
NSA reports show agency may have violated laws by unauthorized surveillance of Americans for over a decade  —  U.S. Spy Agency Reports Improper Surveillance of Americans  —  The National Security Agency today released reports on intelligence collection that may have violated the law …
Matt Day / The Seattle Times:
IRS demands Ballmer, other Microsoft leaders testify in corporate tax audit  —  The Internal Revenue Service has sued former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and a slate of other former and current executives, seeking to compel them to testify in a long-running investigation into how the company's …
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Amazon says 10M people tried Prime, 60% of customers shopped from a mobile device this holiday season  —  Amazon says 10 million new customers tried Prime over the holidays  —  Here's what everyone bought during the holiday shopping rush  —  Pushing the cost of Amazon Prime up to $99 annually …
Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:
After Alleged Rape In New Delhi, Uber Lays Out Additional Safety Measures In India  —  Following an incident in which one of its drivers allegedly raped a female passenger in New Delhi, ride-hailing company Uber has announced additional safety measures it is taking in India.
Eric Meyer / Thoughts From Eric:
Facebook's Year in Review suggestions may in some cases be inadvertently tactless and hurtful  —  Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty  —  I didn't go looking for grief this afternoon, but it found me anyway, and I have designers and programmers to thank for it.  In this case, the designers and programmers are somewhere at Facebook.

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More News

James Vincent / The Verge:

Earlier Picks

Robin Sinha / NDTV Gadgets:
John Timmer / Ars Technica:
Mike Shields / Wall Street Journal: