Edited by T. Trent Gegax & Woody Leonhard | September 12, 2013 06:00 PDT | 09:00 EDT | 13:00 UTC
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>> INTEL (HEART) GOOGLE: Google, Intel cement ties on Chrome OS, could weaken Wintel, by Agam Shah: "New Chromebooks announced this week signal Intel's willingness to broaden its horizons and work with companies like Google, at the expense of its long-standing Windows partnership with Microsoft. Three new Chromebooks from Hewlett-Packard, Acer and newcomer Toshiba with Google's Chrome OS were shown on stage during this week's Intel Developer Forum. The sub-$299 laptops will run on Intel's Haswell chips" InfoWorld
>>>> Intel places its chips in new Google Chromebooks, by Don Clark: WSJ
>> HIGH INSECURITY: Security of Java takes a dangerous turn for the worse, experts say, by Dan Goodin: "[T]hanks to an uptick in attacks targeting vulnerabilities that will never be patched and increasingly sophisticated exploits... [t]he most visible sign of deterioration are in-the-wild attacks exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities in Java version 6... The version, which Oracle stopped supporting in February, is still used by about half of the Java user base... Malware developers have responded by reverse engineering security patches issued for Java 7, and using the insights to craft exploits for the older version. Because Java 6 is no longer supported, the security those same flaws will never be fixed." Ars Technica
** Gartner: Mobility's Impact on Remote Access: Organizations need a strategy for enabling productivity while employees are mobile. Read the free Gartner report to learn why a mix of secure wired, wireless, VPN and VDI technologies is needed to support new use cases for remote and mobile access. Download the report.
>> LIBERTY & JUSTICE: Zuckerberg says the 'government blew it' on the NSA scandal, by Billy Gallagher: "At TechCrunch Disrupt... Zuckerberg said he believes people deserve to know more about government programs and said Facebook is pushing for more transparency. He took issue with the U.S. government's response to the initial NSA leaks, saying the government wasn't spying on American citizens. 'Oh that's really gonna help companies that are trying to serve people around the world,' Zuckerberg cracked. 'I think that was really bad.'" TechCrunch
>>>> Mayer: 'It's treason' for Yahoo to disobey the NSA Business Insider
>>>> What the NSA chief didn't tell Black Hat NetworkWorld
gt;>>> Zuckerberg has some advice for Twitter's IPO: Don't be afraid AllThingsD
>>>> Facebook shares reach all-time high on optimism about mobile Bloomberg
>> SPY VS. SPY: Inside the effort to crowdfund NSA-proof email and chat services, by DJ Pangburn: "Back in 1999, Seattle-based activists formed the communication collective Riseup.net. The site's email and chat services, among other tools, soon offered dissidents a means of encrypted communication essential to their work. Fourteen years later, Riseup is still going strong. In fact, they've been fighting the US state surveillance apparatus longer than most people have been aware of the NSA's shenanigans. Now, the collective is hoping to expand, given the gross privacy transgressions of the NSA and US government as a whole." Motherboard
>> ME TOO: 'Cortana': More on Microsoft's next-generation personal assistant, by Mary Jo Foley: "Cortana will be more than just an app that lets users interact with their phones more naturally using voice commands. Cortana is core to the makeover of the entire "shell" -- the core services and experience -- of the future versions of Windows Phone, Windows and the Xbox One operating systems, from what I've heard from my contacts." ZDNet
>> FLASH DEAL: Western Digital buys flash memory maker Virident, focus now on Fusion-io, by Neha Alawadhi: "Western Digital Corp said it would buy Virident Systems Inc for $685 million as the hard drive maker and Seagate Technology battle for a piece of the fast-growing market for solid-state drives used in servers." Reuters
>> NEW WORLD ORDER: Trade-in programs helping tablet shipments surpass PCs this winter, by Rachel King: "The entire computing (or 'smart connected device') market -- which IDC defines to include PCs, tablets, and smartphones -- is poised to grow by 27.8 percent over 2013, a slightly lower rate than the 30.3 percent growth seen in 2012. While the IDC thinks PCs shipments will still be greater than tablet shipments for the full year, tablet shipments are expected to surpass total PC shipments (desktop and laptops PCs) in the fourth quarter." ZDNet
>> PIRATE HUNT: Exploring Google Search's tenuous relationship with pirated content , by Evan Dashevsky: "Despite Google's insistence that its search function is not the preferred doorway to copyrighted content, Mountain View says it 'has taken steps to prevent terms closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete and Related Search.' The exact whats and hows of Google's search algorithm has long been shrouded in mystery, but I found it to be particularly foggy when it comes to playing around to searching specific terms related to the copyright-free lifestyle." TechHive
>> APPLE AFTERTHOUGHTS: The iPhone 5S fingerprint reader: what you need to know, by Rich Mogull: "When you touch the iPhone's fingerprint sensor, it measures the minuscule differences in conductivity caused by the raised parts of your fingerprint, and it uses those measurements to form an image... Every time you scan your fingerprint, the phone runs through the same algorithmic process and the result is compared with the stored hash. Not only is your actual fingerprint not stored, but it's likely really hard or impossible to recover even if the NSA gets your phone." Macworld
>>>> iPhone 5C pre-orders to being at 12:01 a.m. Pacific on Friday, September 13 MacRumors
>>>> Beyond the iPhone: What pundits don't get about Apple InfoWorld
>>>> Apple to offer iPhone 5 at $100 discount in stores Macworld
>>>> They're colorful, they're fast, they're utterly boring: Meet the new iPhones, not terribly different than the old iPhones Bloomberg
>> WAKE OF WIN8.1: Windows 8.1 Enterprise: 3 features admins should know, by J. Peter Bruzzese: "The top-of-the-line Windows edition has three features that businesses will love: Start Screen control; more BYOD support; sideloading Metro apps... Sideloading has seen some controversy, though. The Enterprise edition includes sideloading licenses; Windows 8.1 Pro and Windows 8.1 RT... can sideload, but only if you buy sideloading licenses for them. That extra licensing cost will discourage sideloading, making it less likely business will develop internal Metro apps." InfoWorld
>> BIG PICTURE: How the 'failure' culture of startups is killing innovation, by Erika Hall: "Far from being the measure of disgrace it once was, failure now seems to be a sort of badge of honor. But underlying many popular Silicon Valley failure clichés is entrepreneurs' belief that "starting companies these days is akin to doing research in the past" -- as if we don't need research when the opportunity to fail is so readily available.... Somewhere along the way, it got to be uncool to reduce one's risk of failure." Wired
>> AUTO UPDATE HELL: Microsoft pulls botched KB 2871630, while many Office patch problems remain, by Woody Leonhard: "There needs to be a Microsoft Security Response Center hair trigger on pullling bad patches. Any question at all and POP, the patch gets pulled, awaiting analysis... If MSRC recommends that customers uninstall patches, then the uninstaller should be in the Automatic Update chute immediately. Hiding uninstall recommendations in obscure corners of the Microsoft site shows just how much Microsoft cares about its customers. Pulling a patch should be a knee-jerk reaction to any problem, real or imagined. If a Microsoft customer is crazy enough to turn on Automatic Update, then it won't matter if they miss the patch today or tomorrow, they'll get it rammed down their throats next week." InfoWorld
>> DADDY WARBUCKS 2.0: Mark Cuban invests in start-up to connect companies to M.B.A.'s, by William Alden: "It started with a cold call: an e-mail in July to the billionaire investor Mark Cuban, asking him for money.... To the surprise of Robert D. Biederman, a co-founder of HourlyNerd, Mr. Cuban responded about 15 minutes later. He was in." NYTimes
>> ARRIVAL GATE: Pandora names former aQuantive (Microsoft) head Brian McAndrews as CEO, by Ryan Faughnder: "Pandora faces growing competition in the Internet streaming music industry from current players such as Spotify and Rdio, along with tech giants with their own new entrants into the crowded field. Those include Google Inc., which has already launched an on-demand streaming service, and Apple Inc., which is releasing its iTunes Radio later this month." LATimes
>>>> Turntable.fm founder: "We're fighting to keep this company alive..." Digital Music News
>> PETTY CLAIMS COURT: Yelp sues small San Diego law firm over alleged fake reviews, by Cyrus Farivar: "Julian McMillan was served with a lawsuit from Yelp, alleging breach of contract, intentional interference with contract, unfair competition, and false advertising. In short, McMillan is being sued over supposed false Yelp reviews posted from 2010 to 2012... Why would Yelp suddenly focus on a small target when presumably fake Yelp reviews are happening on a daily basis across its site? Curiously, Yelp's lawsuit against McMillan was filed just days before a San Diego superior court judge was supposed to rule on Yelp's appeal of a small claims case that McMillan filed against Yelp." Ars Technica
>> LINUS RANTS: on /dev/random: "Short answer: we actually know what we are doing. You don't." Sophos NakedSecurity
>>>> Linux 3.12 Codenamed 'Suicidal Squirrel': Phoronix
>> GUESS THE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE by examining "Hello World!" code: Dmitry Krasnoukhov, Slava Zagorodniy
>> TWEET O' THE DAY: "If TIME doesn't select Edward Snowden as the person of the year, what does it tell about TIME?" @mikko
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