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8:05 PM ET, September 4, 2009

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Loopt Location To Update In The Background On iPhone  —  Loopt, a location-based social networking service, will be the first third-party iPhone service to work in the background while the app is not running.  —  Via a deal with AT&T, and with your permission, Loopt will be able to access …
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Brainstorm Tech:
Meet Seth the blogger guy, AT&T's answer to angry iPhone owners  —  Seth Bloom.  Photo: AT&T  —  “We have heard you.  We are on it.”  —  So says the Seth Bloom — a.k.a. Seth the blogger guy — the geeky talking head that AT&T (T) has sent out to do damage control in the face …
RELATED:
Rafat Ali / paidContent:
Social App Foursquare Takes in $1.35 Million in Funding From Unionsquare  —  Foursquare, the hot iPhone social app that allows you to broadcast your location to your friends, is raising its seed round of $1.35 million., and has raised almost all of it, according to a new SEC document just filed.
RELATED:
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Confirmed: Foursquare Gets $1.35 Million To Play With From Union Square And O'Reilly AlphaTech  —  As we alluded to two days ago, the location-based social network Foursquare has just raised its first round of funding.  PaidContent found out about the seed round through an SEC document, and we've confirmed the round with the company.
Dan Grabham / TechRadar.com:
Samsung: OLED notebooks by late 2010  —  Global computing boss targets release a year from now  —  Samsung says we could get the first commercial OLED laptops a year from now.  —  Speaking at the official IFA launch of the X-Series and N-Series notebooks and netbooks, Kyu Uhm …
Siobhan Gorman / Wall Street Journal:
How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade  —  PALO ALTO, Calif. — From a Silicon Valley office strewn with bean-bag chairs, a group of twenty-something software engineers is building an unlikely following of terrorist hunters at U.S. spy agencies.  —  One of the latest entrants …
Discussion: AdExchanger.com, Thanks:blogfisher
Geoffrey A. Fowler / Digits:
Amazon Offers Redelivery or $30 to People Who Lost '1984′  —  Amazon took a lot of heat in July when it wirelessly deleted copies of two George Orwell titles from the Kindle e-readers of some customers.  CEO Jeff Bezos eventually apologized for the incident, calling it “stupid …
Mathew D / The Global Outpost:
China's Potential Crackdown on Music Piracy  —  China's Ministry of Culture has issued a new online music policy that will regulate online music content and potentially reduce the level of music piracy.  —  Pali Research has already warned that this policy will significantly affect search engine Baidu …
RELATED:
Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:
China Cracks Down On Music Pirates
Discussion: p2pnet
Tim O'Reilly / TechCrunch:
Gov 2.0: It's All About The Platform  —  Editor's note: The following guest post is by Tim O'Reilly, the founder and CEO of computer book publisher O'Reilly Media and a conference organizer.  O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 five years ago.  Now he is arguing it is time for Gov 2.0 …
Dieter Bohn / PreCentral.net:
WebOS 1.2 Accidentally Leaked!  —  go4craig in our Palm Pre Forums has just posted that he applied the webOS Doctor (the ‘last resort’ method for getting your Pre back to factory standard) and, wonder of wonders, it installed webOS 1.2 for him.  Guess what - same thing happened for forum member Leathal.
Kelly Hodgkins / Boy Genius Report:
Verizon Wireless Touch Pro2 to land September 11th, $199.99  —  As if an Android handset and a couple of Blackberry handsets weren't enough, Verizon Wireless customers may have yet another handset coming quickly down the pike.  A trusted ninja let us know that VZW's Touch Pro2 is slated …
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
23andMe Co-Founder Linda Avey Leaves Personal Genetics Start-Up to Focus on Alzheimer's Research  —  BoomTown just got the following email from Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe, the personal genetics start-up, about the departure of her co-founder, Linda Avey (pictured here).
Discussion: TechCrunch
Bloomberg:
Dish Told to Pay TiVo Almost $200 Million Over Patent  —  Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) — Dish Network Corp. and EchoStar Corp. were told to pay almost $200 million to TiVo Inc. for contempt of an order that it stop providing its DVR service after losing a patent-infringement ruling.
Fred / A VC:
RSS Is Alive And Well  —  Somehow the comments on my “10 Characteristics of Great Companies” post yesterday drifted into the topic of the future of RSS.  I was debating whether to wade into this silly debate about whether “RSS is dead” or not and was leaning toward ignoring it.
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Snow Leopard, Marble, And Calamine Lotion  —  There are two types of people in the world: Those that hate change, and those that embrace it.  I tend to fall into the latter category.  And that's why OS X Snow Leopard is an odd product for me.  —  On one hand, I like the idea that Apple …
Discussion: PC World and TUAW, Thanks:mrinaldesai
Lorelle VanFossen / Lorelle on WordPress:
Old WordPress Versions Under Attack  —  Otto42 of OttoDestruct, a key WordPress developer and supporter, reports that there is an “attack” on older versions of WordPress right now.  The number of sites hit by this is growing every hour.  Protect your WordPress blog now: UPDATE NOW!!!
h-online.com:
Mozilla to protect Adobe Flash users  —  The upcoming Firefox 3.5.3 and Firefox 3.0.14 releases, currently in beta, will check the version of Adobe Flash plug-in installed in the browser and warn the user if that plug-in is out of date.  Johnathan Nightingale, “Human Shield” (Security Lead) …
Brian Mastenbrook:
How I cross-site scripted Twitter in 15 minutes, and why you shouldn't store important data on 37signals' applications  —  Today the Ruby on Rails security team released a patch for a cross-site scripting issue which affected multiple high-profile applications, including Twitter and Basecamp.
Discussion: Softpedia News, SC Magazine US and TechCrunch, Thanks:atul
Marisa Taylor / Digits:
How Old Is This Internet Thing, Again?  —  Poor Al Gore has been teased mercilessly for supposedly claiming he invented the Internet. … But that's not the only portion of cyber-history that's in dispute.  —  Media outlets are celebrating Sept. 2 as the 40th anniversary of the day the Internet was invented.
Discussion: The Huffington Post and ABCNEWS
Gmail Blog:
Four new themes  —  Posted by Jake Knapp, UI Designer and Manu Cornet, Software Engineer  —  Manu: Hey Jake, you still using that same old theme?  —  Jake: Well, yeah.  I mean, I like it — but I don't know... I guess it just doesn't feel as new as it used to.  —  Manu: I hear ya.  Well, good news!
Nick Eaton / The Microsoft Blog:
LinkedIn profiles give clues of Windows Mobile 7 features  —  Stephen Chapman, aka the UX Evangelist, has scoured the LinkedIn profiles of tech-industry workers for clues of what features Microsoft is building into its upcoming Windows Mobile 7 phone operating system.
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Bit.ly Offering Even Shorter ‘J.mp’ URLs  —  Bit.ly, Twitter's official URL shortening service, is offering even shorter URLs, via a new ‘j.mp’ service.  —  We just popped open our bit.ly sidebar to send a tweet and got this new URL tool instead.  By knocking out two characters from the URL …
Tim Schulz / TrendSlate:
Former MySpace Exec Allen Hurff to Launch SoCal-based Incubator  —  Allen Hurff, former SVP of Engineering at MySpace, will be launching a startup incubator based in Southern California.  The news comes from his recently-updated LinkedIn page (image below).  —  Details on the incubator are cloudy.
Discussion: cdixon.org, GigaOM, Techgeist and TechCrunch, Thanks:trendslate
Greg Sterling / Search Engine Land:
Is Google Using A Privacy Double Standard?  —  There is a much longer post to be written on Google's privacy policies and its history of combatting or complying with government requests for information and those of third parties using the courts to get access to user data.
Andrew LaVallee / Digits:
Techie-Conference Smackdown  —  An upcoming New York arts and technology event, dubbed the Audience Conference, is scheduled for Nov. 5 and 6, but it's managed to ruffle some techie feathers well in advance. … Several of its speakers, including TechCrunch's Michael Arrington …
Discussion: Copyblogger
Helen / buzzmarketing daily:
Facebook Coming Soon: Ability to Measure Stream Activity  —  If you look closely on the “learn more” blurb on the Facebook Insights there's a very interesting “coming soon” feature.  It reads:  —  Stream CTR / ETR: This graph is a measure of the Click Through Rate and Engagement Rate …
Discussion: All Facebook and Inside Facebook
 
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 More Items: 
Jeff Leins / News in Film:
Cast Set for David Fincher's Social Network?
Discussion: Gawker
Karl Bode / DSLreports:
Verizon: We're Not Setting Broadband Definition Bar Low …
Tech Daily Dose:
FTC Asks FCC To Study Internet Competition
Cliff Edwards / Business Week:
Using Cybercitizens to Hunt Down Hackers
David Kaplan / paidContent:
Updated: Bakersfield Paper May Shutter Community Sites; Execs Offer Differing Views
 Earlier Items: 
Preston Gralla / PC World:
Windows XP: Finally on its Way Out?
Zach Epstein / Boy Genius Report:
Samsung ‘Intrepid’ (Ace II) and ‘Moment’ headed to Sprint
Discussion: WMPoweruser.com and I4U News
Ryan Paul / Ars Technica:
Diebold impeaches e-voting unit, sells it off for $5 million
Discussion: Gearlog and Technologizer
Kevin Purdy / Lifehacker:
Browser Speed Tests: Chrome 4.0 and Opera 10 Take On All Challengers
Discussion: Maximum PC all and digg.com
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
Smule's new T-Pain app provides the Auto-Tuned voice you've always wanted