Edited by T. Trent Gegax & Woody Leonhard |August 19, 2013 06:00 PDT | 09:00 EDT | 13:00 UTC
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>> MORNING BUZZ: Glenn Greenwald's partner detained at Heathrow airport for nine hours, by Guardian Staff: "The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.... David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.... Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles." The Guardian
>>>>APOLOGIA: Data-driven analysis debunks claims that NSA is out of control, by David Gewirt ZDNet
>> SCALING HEIGHTS: Twitter hits new record 143,199 Tweets per second -- here's how they did it, by Raffi Krikorian: "We normally take in... about 5,700 Tweets a second, on average. This particular spike was around 25 times greater than our steady state... The largest architectural change we made was to move from our monolithic Ruby application to one that is more services oriented [primarily using JVM]." Twitter blog
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>> TOO BIG TO FAIL: Google's downtime caused a 40% drop in global Internet traffic, by Simon Tabor: "Google.com was down for a few minutes between 23:52 and 23:57 BST on 16th August 2013. This had a huge effect in the number of pageviews coming into GoSquared's real-time tracking -- around a 40% drop... pageviews spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to their destination." GoSquared Engineering
>> ALL YOUR BASE: Hacker posts Facebook bug report on Zuck's wall: "Dear Mark Zuckerberg, First sorry for breaking your privacy and post to your wall, i has no other choice to make after all the reports i sent to Facebook team... couple days ago i discovered a serious Facebook exploit that allow users to post to other Facebook users timeline while they are not in friend list." Zing! RT
>>>> Facebook Responds: AllThingsD
>> SHOT: Microsoft restores Outlook.com after three-day outage, by Gregg Keizer: "Microsoft on Saturday apologized for a three-day partial outage of Outlook.com [formerly Hotmail] and said the email service was back up and running, only to note hours later that problems still plagued some customers... On Wednesday, Outlook.com, the SkyDrive cloud storage service and the People contacts application [part of Outlook.com/Hotmail] suffered partial outages that began around 10 a.m. ET. While the People problem was fixed about five hours later, SkyDrive's was not fully resolved until Thursday around 4 p.m. ET. Some users of Outlook.com, however, were unable to access email on mobile devices that relied on EAS... until around 4:30 a.m. ET Saturday… Around 2:30 p.m. ET, Microsoft again logged a problem on the status board… [which was marked as resolved about five and a half hours later]… In mid-March, Microsoft's online email service went dark for about 15 hours."InfoWorld
>> CHASER: "In each of the past four quarters, overall uptime for Office 365 has exceeded 99.9%, and Microsoft wants everyone to know it" Computerworld
>> RED TEAM FTW: 'Jekyll' test attack sneaks through Apple App Store, wreaks havoc on iOS, by John Cox: "A malware test app sneaked through Apple's review process disguised as a harmless app, and then re-assembled itself into an aggressive attacker even while running inside the iOS 'sandbox' designed to isolate apps and data from each other." Network World
>>>> Jekyll on iOS Proc 22nd USENIX Security Symposium
>> COMPILE TIME: Rewriting a large production system in Go, by Matt Welsh: "My team at Google is wrapping up an effort to rewrite a large production system (almost) entirely in Go... at first I was highly skeptical of using Go... My whole attitude changed when Michael Piatek (one of the star engineers in the group) sent me an initial cut at the core system rewrite in Go, the result of less than a week's work. Unlike the original C++ based system, I could actually read the code." via Hacker News
>>>> Go ten times faster than Python? Simple benchmark -- amazing results Dustin Collins
>> ESCAPE VELOCITY: Elephant in the room to weigh on growth for Oracle, Teradata, by Rolfe Winkler: "What do you get when you cross Google with a toy elephant? A threat to sales growth for some big technology companies, and a new breed of promising IPO candidates.... Google's innovations have spawned new open-source projects such as Hadoop--named after a toy elephant belonging to the son of one of its creators.... Today, Hadoop is used by Google rivals like Yahoo, Facebook and Apple to help make sense of the flood of data generated by the digital revolution. It is also challenging tech heavyweights like Oracle and Teradata. Their core database technology is too expensive and ill-suited for typical big data tasks.... Startups that support Hadoop users, including Cloudera and Hortonworks, are growing quickly and gearing up for initial public offerings. Hortonworks gets paid to support free Hadoop technology; Cloudera has its own paid version." The Wall Street Journal
>> SPY VS. SPY: Gmail filters out Google's competitors, by Tom Foremski: "Promotional emails are placed in a separate Gmail folder causing marketers to cry foul." ZDNet
>> HIGH INSECURITY: District court holds that intentionally circumventing IP address ban Is "access without authorization" under the CFAA, by Orin Kerr: "During the debate over the Aaron Swartz case, one of the legal issues was whether Swartz had committed an unauthorized access under the CFAA when he changed his IP address to circumvent IP address blocking imposed by system administrators trying to keep Swartz off the network. There was significantly more to the CFAA charges than that, to be clear, including circumventing a subsequent MAC address block and (most significantly) entering an MIT storage closet to install his computer directly. But changing IP addresses to get around IP address blocking was at least one of the possible grounds of unauthorized access. On Friday, Judge Breyer of the Northern District of California handed down the first decision directly addressing the issue. Judge Breyer ruled that changing IP addresses to get around a block is an unauthorized access in violation of the CFAA. The decision is here: Craigslist v. 3taps, Inc." The Volokh Conspiracy
>> MONEY SHOT: Big-data ad platform Rocket Fuel plans $100M IPO, by Dylan Tweney: "Ad network and data-analysis company Rocket Fuel is planning a $100 million initial public offering... Rocket Fuel is the 'fastest growing advertising-technology company in Silicon Valley.' It has raised a total of $76.6 million to date from investors including Mohr Davidow Ventures, Labrador Ventures, Northgate Capital, Summit Partners, and Nokia Growth Partners. Its most recent round was for $50 million in June, 2012. It was founded in 2009 by Yahoo veterans George John, Richard Frankel, and Abhinav Gupta." VentureBeat
>> UPDATE: Mozilla to ship 'Metro-ized' Firefox Dec. 10, by Gregg Keizer: "Mozilla will launch Firefox for Microsoft's Windows 8 'Modern' user interface in mid-December, more than a year after the operating system's launch" InfoWorld
>> DEPARTURE LOUNGE: Twitter lures top Google exec to focus on entertainment biz, by Todd Spangler: "Looking to win more Hollywood followers, Twitter has hired Jennifer Prince, formerly Google's head of media and entertainment ad sales, to pitch new ways movie and TV marketers can use the social giant's platform.... 'All entertainment brands are working with Twitter, but they're just scratching the surface,' Prince said. Over the next few months, she plans to hire a sales team to widen Twitter's coverage of movies and TV and possibly expand into the videogame biz.... As director of entertainment industry sales, Prince will promote Twitter as the 'social soundtrack' that can enhance marketing of TV shows and pics." Variety
>> DEADPOOL: Beats by Dre looks to drop HTC , by Serena Ng, Eva Dou, Hannah Karp: "The maker of the popular Beats by Dr. Dre headphones is looking to buy out its Asian partner and bring in a new investor that can provide it with fresh funds for growth." The Wall Street Journal
>> EXPENSIVE KEYBOARD: Dell drops $299 Windows RT tablet; cheapest deal is now $479, by Agam Shah: "Shoppers who tried to buy a Windows RT tablet at Dell's website Friday morning would have seen one listed for $299. By the end of the day the cheapest tablet came bundled with a keyboard for $479. Dell made several changes to the RT offers on its website. By Friday evening it had eliminated all the options for a standalone tablet and now only sells the product, called the XPS 10, bundled with a keyboard." InfoWorld
>> MORE MINECRAFT: Notch puts 0x10c on ice, community picks up torch, by Cassandra Khaw: "What do you do when a developer tells you that they're putting a project on ice? Most would shrug and wander away. After all, with so many other games in the industry, there's barely any reason to even ponder writing petitions or vitriol-laden letters. However, when Minecraft's Markus 'Notch' Pearson said that he had no future aspirations for 0x10c on a Team Fortress 2 livestream , a small group of avid fans decided that they would not, in fact, migrate to another dream but make 0x10c themselves." US Gamer
>> FUTURENOW: Tesla Model S firmware update brings sleep, creep changes, by Sabastian Blanco: "The new firmware update for the Tesla Model S has arrived, bringing with it a few changes to how the all-electric car operates. The new features we find listed include the ability to connect to WiFi networks and to tether, a Tow Mode (for when the car is being towed, not to tow something using your fancy EV), a Screen Cleaning Mode and the ability to control the radio presets via steering wheel controls. There are also enhancements to the maps, driver profiles and "improved creep performance." autobloggreen
>> REVIEW: Why Ashton Kutcher's 'Jobs' couldn't boot up at the box office: "The $6.7M debut for the drama about the iconic Apple founder is among actor's worst ever." The Wrap
>> GEEK SIREN: Other sci-fi TV shows Microsoft could revive for Xbox Live, by John Callaham: Spoiler alert... Star Trek revived on Xbox Live? Neowin
>> FANBOY TODAY: Goldfinger: The next iPhone, by MG Siegler: "Yes, there will be a gold iPhone... Think: less 'gold' and more 'champagne'." TechCrunch
>>>> Samsung, Sony readying new devices ahead of next iPhone Bloomberg
>> HACK4GOOD: To make the world a better place: via Hacker News
>> Amazon's Funniest Reviews via BGR
>> TWEET O' THE DAY: "Amazon declined to comment on journalist's claim that it always say no comment when asked for comment." @romenesko
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