Techmeme
February 17, 2015, 3:45 AM

Top News

Ian Parker / New Yorker:
An in-depth look inside the top-secret lab where Jonathan Ive's design team created the Apple Watch  —  The Shape of Things to Come  —  How an industrial designer became Apple's greatest product.  —  I. Launch Day … “We can do this the easy way or we can do this the cute way.”  —  »
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Extensive Kasperky Lab report details advanced spy capabilities of Stuxnet-linked threat actor dubbed “Equation Group”  —  How “omnipotent” hackers tied to NSA hid for 14 years—and were found at last  —  “Equation Group” ran the most advanced hacking operation ever uncovered.
Joseph Menn / Reuters:
NSA-linked “Equation Group” can infect computers repeatedly via spyware inserted in hard disk firmware  —  Russian researchers expose breakthrough U.S. spying program  —  (Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives …
Harrison Weber / VentureBeat:
Pebble's Android Wear support goes from beta to public release  —  Smartwatch maker Pebble now supports Android Wear notifications  —  Obsessed with mobile growth?  Join us February 23-24 when we reveal the best technologies and strategies to help your company grow on mobile.
Conor Dougherty / New York Times:
Google X head Astro Teller says Neural Network Project, formerly Google Brain, produces value comparable to total Google X costs  —  Astro Teller, Google's ‘Captain of Moonshots,’ on Making Profits at Google X  —  Google is all over the place.  From biotechnology and robots to satellites …
Jean-Louis Gassée / Monday Note:
Apple, while capable of building a car, would face low margins and challenges developing autonomous driving tech  —  The Fantastic Apple Car  —  Forget the iWatch, Apple Pay, and the iPhone 7...the next big thing from Cupertino will be the Apple Car.  —  At first, I didn't pay much attention to the Apple Car rumors.
Mike Beasley / 9to5Mac:
WSJ: Apple struggled to find purpose for Apple Watch after many planned health features were cut  —  The Wall Street Journal revealed tonight that many of the planned health features that Apple intended to include in its first-generation wearable were cut from the final product.
Michael Zhang / PetaPixel:
Toshiba developing rear 5MP and 13MP camera modules and a front-facing 2MP module for Project Ara  —  Toshiba Shows Off its Camera Module Prototypes for Google's Project Ara Phone  —  Google is hard at work on Project Ara, a modular smartphone that will allow users to swap critical components in and out, including the onboard camera.
Andrew Cunningham / Ars Technica:
Samsung's first 14nm SoC is a 64-bit, 8-core Exynos aimed at high-end phones  —  New manufacturing process extends to other Exynos and third-party chips soon.  —  Samsung has just announced a new high-end Exynos 7 Octa SoC.  It uses eight CPU cores—a combination of four high-end Cortex A57 cores …

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Scott Stein / CNET:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch: