Top Items:
Jim Goldman / CNBC.com:
Apple's Jobs is (Still) Fine — You want to know how skittish Apple investors are and how little conviction they have in the company, or trust in its message, look no further than today's Gizmodo rumor fiasco. — The blog reports a serious decline in Steve Jobs' health as the real reason …
RELATED:
Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo:
Steve Jobs' Health Declining Rapidly, Reason for Macworld Cancellation — According to a previously reliable source, Apple misrepresented the reasons behind Macworld and Jobs' keynote cancellation. Allegedly, the real cause is his rapidly declining health. In fact, it may be even worse than we imagined:
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Steve Jobs' Health ‘Totally Fine’ — CNBC (AAPL) — Conflicting reports about Apple (AAPL) boss Steve Jobs' health: A “solid” Gizmodo source says Jobs' health, not politics, is the reason why Jobs is skipping his annual Macworld Expo keynote. CNBC's Jim Goldman follows up saying that's not true …
win.tue.nl:
MD5 considered harmful today — Creating a rogue CA certificate — Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, Benne de Weger — We have identified a vulnerability in the Internet Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to issue digital certificates for secure websites.
Discussion:
Tech Beat, Network World, Computerworld Blogs, Zero Day, Hack a Day, CrunchGear, Washington Post, Bits, securosis.com, The Register, Mozilla Security Blog, internetnews.com, Security Fix, InformationWeek, hackademix.net, Obsessable, eWeek, Errata Security, TidBITS, SC Magazine US, Engadget, GMSV, BreakingPoint Labs Blog, Security Research, Destructoid, CircleID and Windows Connected
RELATED:
Microsoft:
Microsoft Security Advisory (961509) — Research proves feasibility of collision attacks against MD5 — Microsoft is aware that research was published at a security conference proving a successful attack against X.509 digital certificates signed using the MD5 hashing algorithm.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Large Form iPod Touch To Launch in Fall '09 — We've got this from three independent sources close to Apple: expect a large screen iPod touch device to be released in the Fall of '09, with a 7 or 9 inch screen. Prototypes have been seen and handled by one of our sources, and Apple is talking to OEMs in Asia now about mass production.
Discussion:
VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, MacBlogz, GottaBeMobile.com, Incremental Blogger, Edible Apple and digg.com
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Gawker Media's Nick Denton Sells Another Blog and Puts Another One on the Block — Gawker Media's Nick Denton continues to shrink his blog empire: He has sold off Consumerist.com to Consumers Union, the nonprofit that publishes Consumer Reports. And he is in talks to sell Defamer.com.
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Stephanie Clifford / New York Times:
Consumers Union to Buy a Blog From Gawker — Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, planned to announce Wednesday that it had acquired Consumerist.com, a popular blog formerly owned by Gawker Media. — Consumerist is one of several sites Gawker has sold this year …
Wall Street Journal:
Musician Finds a Following Online — Word-of-Mouth on Blogs and Other Sites Attracts Fans — and a Record Deal — In late 2006, Justin Vernon, a musician in Eau Claire, Wis., recorded nine songs while staying at his parents' hunting cabin in northern Wisconsin after a breakup with a girlfriend and his long-time band.
Megan McCarthy / Techmeme News:
Top 10 objectively biggest tech stories of 2008 — Unlike other news sites, our impartial and omniscient news relevance engine enables us to produce a purely objective top story list for the year. Ok, ok, that's not strictly true, in fact manual editing was even phased in recently.
Matthew Lasar / Ars Technica:
Martin drops porn filtering from FCC free wireless broadband plan — Kevin Martin, the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, called Ars Technica today to let us know that he has revised his proposal to roll out a free (and smut-free) wireless broadband service.
APC:
Apple prepping a quad-core MacBook Pro? … Apple's mid-October refresh of its notebook line left a curious gap at the top end of the card, with the 17 inch MacBook Pro missing the make-over of its 15 inch cousin and the 13.3 inch MacBook. — That could be about to change next week …
Discussion:
TechSpot, Gadget Lab, TheAppleBlog, APC, MacBlogz, MacRumors, CNET News, MacDailyNews and InformationWeek
Katie Marsal / AppleInsider:
Piper sees dull Macworld, new form factor iPhone by spring — With Apple chief executive Steve Jobs skipping out on this year's Macworld Expo, investment bank Piper Jaffray isn't holding high hopes for new product announcements outside a pair of refreshed Macs, but said in a report Tuesday …
Shira Ovide / Digits:
John Malone Quietly Dumps IAC Shares — Why has John Malone been dumping his shares of IAC/InterActiveCorp in the past two weeks? — The company controlled by cable industry pioneer Mr. Malone in recent weeks has sold roughly $17.5 million worth of IAC stock, including a 193,000 share sale reported Tuesday.
comScore:
Sales during Online Holiday Shopping Season Decline by 3 Percent — Despite Weak Season Apple, Amazon, Wal-Mart and Sears Post Traffic Increases — comScore (NASDAQ : SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today reported its tracking of holiday season retail e-commerce spending …
Jack Loechner / MediaPost:
Most Media To Suffer Retrenchment in 2009 — According to a new report by FitchRatings, the company forecasts that the contraction in output among the major advanced economies will represent the steepest decline since the Second World War, with GDP in the U.S. to decline approximately 1.2%, while inflation is forecast to be 2.7%.
Michael Calore / Epicenter:
Ambient News Brings RSS to You, No Subscription Required — Lazy people, listen up. Now there's an RSS news reader made just for you. — Over the past two weeks or so, I've been playing around with some new, experimental Firefox add-ons that explore new ways of aggregating headlines of news stories on the web.
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Tough Love For Microsoft Search — Back in June, I spoke at Microsoft as part of a regular series for those involved with its webmaster tools group and anyone generally interested in search. My talk was called “Tough Love For Microsoft Search,” and I covered various reasons why I felt …
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
Brightkite Integrates with Facebook — Do you want your Facebook friends to know where you are and what you're doing at all times? That's now possible thanks to mobile social network Brightkite and its recent integration with Facebook. Through the addition of Facebook Connect …
Discussion:
Brightkite Blog, The Web Services Report, VentureBeat, NewTeeVee, Feld Thoughts, RotorBlog.com, Technosailor.com and All Facebook
Robin Goad / Hitwise Intelligence:
Social Xmas: Facebook's busiest day ever, YouTube overtakes Hotmail, Social networks = 10% of UK Internet traffic — With all of the focus on the economic downturn and the troubles in the retail sector, it's easy to forget the continued growth of social networking in the UK.
Chris Dannen / Fast Company:
How 2009 Will Spur The Rebirth Of Cyber Squatting — Call it the end of the dot-com world. Next year ICANN, the non-profit that oversees domain name and IP address registration, will start taking applications for new domain name suffixes, creating the potential for billions of new addresses ending …
Michael Thompson / Ars Technica:
Downloading your games? Get ready for extra fees — The business of selling games has rapidly changed over the past few years, mainly because online services have allowed developers to bypass the middleman that is retail stores. There are major advantages to purchasing a game via digital distribution …
Ryan Singel / Epicenter:
With Flickr Layoffs, Whither ‘The Commons’? — In mid-December, when Yahoo laid off George Oates, one of the original employees of the photo-sharing website Flickr, Oates immediately feared for The Commons, Flickr's project to have its millions of members turn their distributed intelligence to the world's photo archives.
Jason Green / Mercury News:
Thieves steal $10,000 in equipment from Palo Alto Apple Store, later hit Los Gatos site — Two men broke into the Apple store in downtown Palo Alto early Sunday morning and made off with $10,000 in high-tech gear, police reported. — The thieves triggered an alarm at the University Avenue store …
Ben Kunz / Business Week:
A Modest Blogging Proposal — If “pay per post” lets online writers shill for cash, why not go all the way and sell real-life opinions, too? — It all started with a simple question from Forrester Research (FORR) analyst Jeremiah Owyang late in the afternoon on Friday, Dec. 12.
Discussion:
The Noisy Channel
