Techmeme
April 17, 2015, 10:40 PM

Top News

David McLaughlin / Bloomberg Business:
Sources: US Justice Department lawyers leaning against Comcast merger with Time Warner Cable, could submit recommendation next week  —  U.S. Antitrust Lawyers Said to Be Leaning Against Comcast Merger  —  Staff attorneys at the Justice Department's antitrust division are nearing a recommendation …
Wall Street Journal:
Apple plans to launch Pay in Canada in November, in talks with six biggest banks, which account for more than 90% of country's retail bank accounts  —  Apple Pay Plans to Launch in Canada This Fall  —  Apple is in talks with six Canadian banks for mobile payment service's first venture outside the U.S.
Jordan Pearson / Motherboard:
MakerBot's new CEO lays off 20% of the staff, about 100 people  —  MakerBot Just Laid Off 20 Percent of Its Staff  —  When MakerBot, the Brooklyn-based 3D printing company, became a subsidiary of 3D printing giant Stratasys, Inc. in 2013, everyone expected there would be changes.
Kurt Wagner / Re/code:
Klout co-founder Joe Fernandez steps down as CEO about a year after firm's acquisition  —  Klout Founder Joe Fernandez Steps Down  —  Klout co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez has stepped down from his role leading the social media influence startup that's now owned by Lithium Technologies.
Tweets: @marshallk
Farhad Manjoo / New York Times:
Interview: Slack's Stewart Butterfield on the favorable fundraising climate and options for spending the $160M he recently raised  —  Is Slack Really Worth $2.8 Billion?  A Conversation With Stewart Butterfield  —  When I recently wrote about Slack, a corporate messaging app that has aspirations …
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Google Says “Vast Majority” Of Ads On Its Platforms Will Be Encrypted By June 30  —  Google has been gradually moving all of its online services to HTTPS encryption — you may even remember the excitement wayyyy back in 2008, when Gmail switched to HTTPS.  —  In a blog post published this morning …
More: Inside AdWords and Yahoo.  Tweets: @csoghoian and @dujkan
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Microsoft to bring universal Office apps to Windows Phones in a test build before the end of April  —  What's next for Microsoft's ‘universal’ Office apps  —  Summary:Microsoft is readying a test build of its Office ‘Universal’ apps for Windows Phones before the end of April.
Jordan Crook / TechCrunch:
Universal credit card device Coin ships 350K units after year delay, some backers still must wait months  —  Coin, The One Credit Card To Rule Them All, Is Finally Shipping  —  The Coin (promising to let you combine all your credit/debit/loyalty cards into a single piece of tech) …
C. Custer / Tech in Asia:
Xiaomi CEO says company has invested in 20+ startups and plans to invest in a hundred more  —  Lei Jun: Xiaomi will invest in 100 more startups  —  This has been a big week for the Xiaomi ecosystem, as one of the companies in the Xiaomi fold just acquired Segway.
Eduard Kovacs / SecurityWeek:
Recently patched Windows flaw seen exploited in the wild for DDoS attacks; web servers of 70M sites at risk  —  Recently Patched Windows Flaw Exploited in the Wild for DoS Attacks  —  SANS Institute researchers advise system administrators to update their Windows operating systems as soon …
Howard Blume / Los Angeles Times:
L.A. schools iPad program subject of inquiry by SEC  —  The federal Securities and Exchange Commission recently opened an informal inquiry into whether Los Angeles school officials complied with legal guidelines in the use of bond funds for the now-abandoned $1.3-billion iPads-for-all project.
Joel Hruska / ExtremeTech:
How Moore's Law has been reinvented over the last 50 years, becoming cultural shorthand for innovation itself  —  Moore's Law is dead, long live Moore's Law  —  Moore's Law turns 50 this coming week — making this an opportune time to revisit Gordon Moore's classic prediction …
David C. Brock / Backchannel:

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Matthew Wall / BBC: