Edited by T. Trent Gegax & Woody Leonhard | September 30, 2013 06:00 PDT | 09:00 EDT | 13:00 UTC
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>> CRIMES & MISDEMEANORS: Judge tosses Apple motion, allows patent troll Lodsys to continue rampage, by Joe Mullin: "After two years of litigation, it's back to square one. The East Texas judge overseeing Lodsys' systematic patent attack on app developers has refused to even consider Apple's motion. Instead, he allowed the patent-holding company to settle all its cases--and then dismissed Apple's motion as moot. By doing so, US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap... has enabled Lodsys to threaten developers for months, and perhaps even years, to come." Ars Technica
>>>> FTC publishes a long list of questions it wants to ask 'patent trolls' Ars Technica
>> COMING ATTRACTIONS: Twitter plans to make its IPO filing public this week, by Zachary M. Seward: "Twitter's IPO filing is ready, and the company intends to make it public this week, according to someone familiar with the plan. The goal is for Twitter to begin trading, likely on the New York Stock Exchange, before Thanksgiving." Quartz
>> APPLE OF ALL EYES: Apple beats Coca-Cola to emerge as most valuable global brand, by John Ribeiro: "Apple... ranked second last year, saw its brand value grow 28 percent this year to $98.3 billion. Other tech companies that figured in the top five rankings for 2013 were Google at number two and IBM and Microsoft at fourth and fifth place, respectively. Google was number four in 2012, while IBM was third and Microsoft held the fifth position last year." InfoWorld
>> YOU'VE GOT ADS: Gmail 4.6: Ads are coming to Gmail for Android, unsent messages warning, and more, by Artem Russakovskii: "The most significant under-the-hood and probably not active yet addition to Gmail 4.6 is ads. Yup, ads are most definitely coming to Gmail for Android which managed to stay ad-free all this time, unlike its web counterpart." Android Police
>> SOUR NOTE: Violin Memory plunges on debut after raising $162 million, by Leslie Picker & Lee Spears: "Violin Memory, which has booked losses every year since at least 2010, faces increasing competition after Hewlett-Packard Co., a former customer, started selling its own storage product. EMC Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and Dell Inc. bolstered their own storage offerings through acquisitions." Bloomberg
>> HIDE YOUR PERSONAL IP: Websites vary prices, deals based on users' information, by Jennifer Valentino-Devries, Jeremy Singer-Vine, Ashkan Soltani: "It was the same Swingline stapler, on the same Staples.com website. But for Kim Wamble, the price was $15.79, while the price on Trude Frizzell's screen, just a few miles away, was $14.29... Staples appeared to consider the person's distance from a rival brick-and-mortar store, either OfficeMax Inc. or Office Depot Inc. If rival stores were within 20 miles or so, Staples.com usually showed a discounted price." Wall Street Journal (paywalled)
>> STRONGER THAN THE NSA: Palantir just raised a massive $196M, by VentureBeat: "The startup is notoriously press-shy, as it mines highly sensitive data for pharmaceutical companies and government agencies... boasts an unrivaled engineering and data science team. It handles messy swamps of data and turns it into data visualizations and maps. The company has built up a reputation in Silicon Valley for recruiting some of the most talented engineers from nearby Stanford University." VentureBeat
>>>> How a 'deviant' philosopher built Palantir, a CIA-funded data-mining juggernaut Forbes
>>SPY VS. SPY: NSA Internet spying sparks race to create offshore havens for data privacy: Firms tout 'Email made in Germany' as more secure; Brazil wants its own servers. Wall Street Journal (paywalled)
>>>> NSA gathers data on social connections of US citizens NY Times (paywalled)
>> IN LAND OF THE BLIND, ONE-EYED MAN IS KING: Nokia Lumia 520 apparently best-selling Windows device, by Adnan Farooqui: "The low end Nokia Lumia 520 is the best-selling single Windows device in the world... [it sells more] than any single model of any Windows Phone smartphone, Windows powered tablet or even a Windows PC." Ubergizmo
>>>> BlackBerry and Nokia: The perils of a closed strategy InfoWorld
>> PETARD, MEET HOIST: Microsoft breaks ties with company over its mistaken Google DMCA takedown requests, by John Callaham: "Microsoft has been caught sending out mistaken DMCA takedown requests to Google in the past, but this week the company decided to take some action after a French company, LeakID, made some rather embarrassing website removal requests on behalf of Microsoft last week. TorrentFreak reports that LeakID had asked Google to remove sites from its search results that included several pages from Microsoft's own website, along with the Wikipedia page for Office 2007. Google, thankfully, figured out that LeakID's requests were not correct." Neowin
>> KEEPS ON TICKIN': Apple's iOS 7 includes a surprise: a ticket to the next generation of the internet, by Christopher Mims: "At present, if your phone or tablet is connected to Wi-Fi and a cellular network at the same time, it can only use one or the other connection to transmit data. But what if your Wi-Fi connection or your 3G connection drops? Whatever data was being transmitted… will fail to arrive, and you have to try again… if one of your connections to the internet slows down, or speeds up, your phone has no ability to use its other connections to its advantage... if you've already downloaded Apple's iOS 7 to your iPhone or iPad, you could be using it already." Quartz
>> ANGELS VS. VC'S: AngelList Syndicates will also pit Angel against Angel, by Hunter Walk: "AngelList Syndicates will hasten the death of the worst performing VCs by further commoditizing capital and giving super angels more $$ to put into deals... One aspect that hasn't been discussed much is how they now make the angel environment more competitive as well... Maybe an angel differentiation before too long will be LACK of a syndicate so that they can put an easy $25-$50k into deals." Hunter Walk blog
>>>> The great venture capital rotation Jason Calacanis
>>>> Is AngelList Syndicates really such a big deal? Both sides of the table
>> FUTURE OF GAMING: Analyzing Valve's SteamOS, Steam Machines, and Steam Controller, by Jarred Walton: "Valve has released additional details about what they're planning, and it's a move that will definitely shake up the gaming industry. " AnandTech
>>>> Join the Steam hardware beta and help us shape a new generation of gaming Steam
>> AYUDAME!: How Google converted language translation into a problem of vector space mathematics: "To translate one language into another, find the linear transformation that maps one to the other. Simple, say a team of Google engineers." MIT Technology Review
>> WILE E. COYOTE: Microsoft buys used iPhones in latest attempt to get consumers to switch to Windows: Third deal this month offers minimum of $200 for an iPhone 4S or iPhone 5. Computerworld
>> DATAVIZ: Five dead social networks. Lock-ins don't last, by Benedict Evans
>> BlackBerry co-founder was vehemently opposed to touchscreen BlackBerry 10 smartphones TNW
>> The moment of truth: When new eyes meet old code InfoWorld
>> Microsoft received 37,000 end-user data requests [from law enforcement] in first half of 2013 PC World
>> Reason for optimism about Windows 9 InfoWorld
>> Evernote teams up with Salesforce.com on collaboration app GigaOM
>> How the FBI found Miss Teen USA's webcam spy Ars Technica
>> Cloudius builds new open-source cloud operating system eWeek
>> Everything you needed to know about the internet in May 1994 Time
>> SimplyInsured is hiring hackers - change healthcare forever YCombinator
>> TWEET O' THE DAY: "So I hear there's this tv show about a meth dealer or something, should I start watching that?" @tomtomorrow
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