Techmeme
January 2, 2017, 8:30 PM

Top News

Mark Spoonauer / Laptop Mag:
Dell's XPS 13 2-in-1 starts at $1K, has compact fanless design, fingerprint reader, support for optional stylus, and decent battery life of about 8.5 hours  —  Pros / Most compact 2-in-1 with 13-inch screen; Comfortable keyboard; Vibrant InfinityEdge display; Impressive audio …
Matthew Humphries / PC Magazine:
Researchers: ID codes printed on boarding passes, luggage tags for ~90% of flights let hackers access travelers' personal info, steal reservations, more  —  Booking a flight has become a simple process thanks to the Internet, and once you have flights secured you can relax, right?
Jemima Kelly / Reuters:
Bitcoin jumps above $1,000 for first time in three years  —  Digital currency bitcoin kicked off the new year by jumping above $1,000 for the first time in three years late on Sunday, having outperformed all central-bank-issued currencies with a 125 percent climb in 2016.
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
FBI-DHS report fails to make a hard case that Russia tampered with US elections, likely because the agencies want to protect methods for detecting hacks  —  US issued JAR billed itself as an indictment that would prove Russian involvement.  —  Talk about disappointments.
Kara Swisher / Recode:
Twitter's managing director for Greater China, Kathy Chen, leaves after 8 months  —  Kathy Chen follows others out the door of the social communications company.  —  Twitter lost yet another top exec with the departure of Kathy Chen, its managing director in Greater China.
Agence France-Presse:
French law requiring companies to give workers a “right to disconnect” from work-related messages after work hours now in effect  —  From 1 January, workers have ‘right to disconnect’ as France seeks to establish agreements that afford work flexibility but avoid burnout
Joseph Cox / Motherboard:
Security Without Borders project launches to help journalists and activists with cybersecurity by connecting them with volunteer group of InfoSec professionals  —  Some hackers have lost their way.  Today, countless techies have entered the for-profit cybersecurity business …
Nate Hoffelder / The Digital Reader:
Scribd removes comics from its subscription reading service after adding them in 2015  —  A reader has tipped me to the news that Scribd has quietly removed digital comics from its subscription reading service.  Ten thousand comics had been added in February 2015 when Scribd was still in the upward swing …
Joe Mullin / Ars Technica:
Review of appeals court decisions from 2016 that benefited software patent holders and set the bar for software patents after Supreme Court's Alice decision  —  It's harder, but not impossible, for owners of software patents to win cases.  —  In 2014, the US Supreme Court dealt a major blow to software patents.

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Earlier Picks

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch: