Techmeme: Facebook, Twitter, and Google resist Russian regulator's orders to remove information on rally supporting opposition leader Navalny (Wall Street Journal)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

December 28, 2014, 6:20 AM

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.

More: New York Times, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, VICE News, Guardian, Associated Press, Gizmodo, NPR, Business Insider, Voice of America, NBC News, Associated Press, The Register, Electronista, The Verge and Engadget

Arik Hesseldahl / Re/code:

North Korean Internet experienced a 5+ hour outage after its only wireless carrier went down — Internet Crashes in North Korea as 3G Networks Fail — Three days after an apparent denial-of-service attack halted its Internet connections, North Korea suffered another Internet outage …

More: USA Today, NBC News, NEWS.com.au, The Wrap, CircleID, Ars Technica, CNBC, TechCrunch, Mashable, CNET and GeekTime. Tweets: @dynresearch

Ernesto / TorrentFreak:

The Interview sees over 1.5M estimated torrent downloads in first two days of availability, comparable to popular blockbusters

William Turton / The Daily Dot:

Meet Lizard Squad, the group whose DDoS attack crippled Xbox Live and PlayStation Network — Meet Lizard Squad, the hackers who ruined Christmas for gamers worldwide — Vinnie Omari was still a bit drunk when he initiated what could be the biggest distributed denial-of-service attack in history.

More: Engadget, Xbox One Support, PC Magazine, Gawker, Kotaku, Gizmodo, Business Insider, The Inquisitr News, Forbes, PandoDaily, The Register, Polygon, bizjournals, The Verge and The Next Web

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.

More: Gizmodo, ZDNet, Mashable, Washington Post, Business Insider, PC Magazine, The Register, SiliconANGLE, Gigaom, ReadWrite and Business Insider

Tweets: @lizardmafia, @lizardmafia, @kaepora, @kaepora, @torproject, @lizardmafia and @fredericjacobs

Mike Fahey / Kotaku:

PlayStation Network still experiencing outages days after DDoS attack reportedly ceased

More: PlayStation Blog, PlayStation Knowledge Center, Wall Street Journal, IGN, VentureBeat, ITworld.com, Polygon, VentureBeat and New York Times

Tweets: @askplaystation, @askplaystation and @jeffgerstmann

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: TorrentFreak and Hacked. Thanks:@epro

Alyson Shontell / Business Insider:

As competition among VCs increases, some founders sell shares in early funding rounds — Investors Are ‘Fighting Like Drunken Sailors’ Over Hot Startups And Letting Founders Get Rich Too Early — Venture Capitalists used to invest in startups so founders could build businesses.

More: Wall Street Journal. Tweets: @ajs, @alex, @abrams and @fazz

Wall Street Journal:

Facebook, Twitter, and Google resist Russian regulator's orders to remove information on rally supporting opposition leader Navalny — U.S. Tech Firms Face Showdown With Russian Censors — Facebook, Twitter, Google Wrestle With Kremlin Orders to Erase Content

More: Neowin, Engadget and SiliconBeat

Tweets: @mathewi and @amir

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 …

More: WinBeta, bizjournals and GeekWire

Jeff John Roberts / Gigaom:

Comcast-TWC merger looks less likely amid growing opposition, concern over state of US broadband — As Comcast merger enters final phase, deal may be on thin ice — Credit: André P. Meyer-Vitali/Flickr CC — Credit: André P. Meyer-Vitali/Flickr CC

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.

More: TechCrunch, VentureBeat and Business Insider

Tweets: @jollysonali, @levie, @chrisamccoy, @patrickc, @cdixon, @cdixon, @alex, @smc90, @smc90 and @mdudas

Thanks:@ryanm

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 …

More: Amazon.com, VentureBeat, Wall Street Journal, BetaNews, TechCrunch, CNET, tech.co, internetretailer.com, Electronista, SlashGear, Mashable, GeekWire, Business Insider and SiliconBeat. Tweets: @mdudas

Michelle Moghtader / Reuters:

Iran to expand Internet “smart filtering” to censor content without banning entire websites — Iran expands ‘smart’ Internet censorship — (Reuters) - Iran is to expand what it calls “smart filtering” of the Internet, a policy of censoring undesirable content on websites without banning …

More: TweakTown News, Trend.Az and RT

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:

Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.

Cloudflare:

Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference — Stop preparing for agents. Start running them. 100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.

Zoho:

Pro Tips: 4 tips to overcome data problems in your CRM — Most CRM data problems don't look like problems. At a glance, your CRM looks fine: records exist, fields are filled, and reports run.

IDrive:

Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

Invest Like the Best:

Noah Shinn - Building Instinct: The Personal Agent

The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.

Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.

Lenny's Podcast:

The grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through the tech industry right now | Molly Graham

Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.

Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.

Big Technology Podcast:

Meta's Muse Revival, Frontier AI Under Threat, The Rise Of Dopamine Sites

The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.

Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.

Sources:

Satya Nadella on Microsoft's agent bet and AI's trust problem

Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

Subscribe to Sources.

Channels with Peter Kafka:

Meta's New $1300 Glasses and the Fight to Control AI

Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.

Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.

Great Chat:

Doomers at Dreamforce

A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.

Subscribe to Great Chat.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:20 AM ET, December 28, 2014.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.