Top Items:
Mike Isaac / Social Medium:
Facebook and Twitter Suspend Operation Payback Accounts — Apparently, Wikileaks has a posse. — Or rather, those who support the ideals behind Wikileaks, and the spreading of information. On Tuesday, my colleague Andy Greenberg reported on how the hacker group Operation:Payback …
Discussion:
Political Punch, L.A. Times Tech Blog, The Next Web, ReadWriteWeb, Budi Putra, Techie Buzz, Mashable!, The Firewall, SAI and The Huffington Post
RELATED:
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Why Wikileaks Will Never Be Closed Or Blocked — Last weekend, rather than read stories about the US diplomatic cables that Wikileaks has released, I decided to read them directly myself. In doing so, I better understood why no one — certainly not the US State Department — is going to shove those cables back into the darkness.
Discussion:
ReadWriteWeb, Guardian, Gawker, Mashable!, Washington Post, Techland, Between the Lines Blog, Boing Boing, The Lede, CNET News, msnbc.com, The Register, VentureBeat, Switched, Neowin.net, THINQ.co.uk, The Huffington Post, ITProPortal, TechCrunch, TG Daily, Geek.com, Pulse2 and New York Times
The PayPal Blog:
Updated Statement about WikiLeaks from PayPal General Counsel, John Muller — Media reports today regarding a statement made by our vice president of platform, mobile and new ventures, Osama Bedier, at the LeWeb conference in Paris, have created confusion about PayPal's decision …
Discussion:
The Next Web, eMoney, The Register and Neowin.net
Guardian:
WikiLeaks: Who are the hackers behind Operation Payback? — The MasterCard website was forced offline for several hours today, following an online assault led by a shadowy group of hackers protesting against the card issuer's decision to block payments made to the WikiLeaks website.
John Battelle / John Battelle's Searchblog:
Why Wouldn't Google Mirror Wikileaks?
Why Wouldn't Google Mirror Wikileaks?
Discussion:
PC World, The Huffington Post and Emily Bell, more at Mediagazer »
Brian Crecente / Kotaku:
Apple Loses Its iPhone Game Guru — The man in charge of making sure that Apple's popular portable devices play games well is no longer with the tech titan. — Graeme Devine joined Apple's iPhone Game Technologies division last year. Devine tells Kotaku that his last day at the company was Friday.
Discussion:
Macworld, AppleInsider, VentureBeat, paidContent, IntoMobile, Touch Arcade, SelectStart and Joystiq
Carolyn Penner / Twitter Blog:
To Trend or Not to Trend... Since Twitter first introduced the Trends feature in the summer of 2008, one frequently asked question has been “Why isn't X trending?” This question has come up around a variety of subjects, from #justinbieber and #adamlambert to #flotilla, #iranelection and #demo2010.
Discussion:
VentureBeat, SAI, Guardian, SelectStart, Social Medium, The Next Web and ResourceShelf
Jonathan S. Geller / BGR:
BlackBerry PlayBook hands-on video demo — We promised a hands on demo video of the BlackBerry PlayBook, and that's what you're going to get from us — almost 10 minutes of 1080p joy. As we said previously, we were pretty impressed seeing the PlayBook demo'd in person right in front of us, and well, we could go on for days.
Discussion:
LAPTOP Magazine, GottaBeMobile, CrackBerry.com blogs, BlackBerry Cool, PhoneDog.com, BlackBerry Leaks, Gizmodo, Electronista, LaptopMemo and CrunchGear
Rose Yao / Facebook Blog:
More Control on Mobile — Over 200 million people use Facebook on their mobile phones to share photos, access applications and stay connected with friends. In October, we added a dashboard to give you a way to clearly see and control the ways applications use your information.
Discussion:
PC Magazine, L.A. Times Tech Blog, eWeek, Inside Facebook, All Facebook, SAI, Social Medium, IntoMobile, Covering Web, SiliconANGLE, The Next Web, TechCrunch, WebProNews and Download Squad
Nicholas Carlson / SAI:
Why Groupon Said No To Google's $6 Billion — Each and every Groupon board member stood to gain millions, hundreds of millions, or even more than a billion dollars by accepting Google's $6 billion offer to acquire the company. — Groupon cofounders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky might …
Discussion:
Tech Trader Daily
Daniel Bates / Daily Mail:
Twins who accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing idea for Facebook launch ANOTHER lawsuit against him — The twins who have accused Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for the world-conquering website from them have re-started their bitter legal battle against him.
Discussion:
Switched
Lauren A. E. Schuker / Wall Street Journal:
Movies at Home, for $20,000 — A proposed service aims to bring movies to homes the same day they hit theaters, a milestone that Hollywood has long anticipated with a mixture of fear and fascination. — But there's a catch: At the prices currently being discussed by Prima Cinema Inc. …
Discussion:
Engadget, Gizmodo, Reuters, Techland, BloggingStocks, Gizmodo Australia, I4U News, virtualeconomics and Company Town, more at Mediagazer »
Tom Warren / WinRumors:
New Windows 8 user interface codenamed ‘Wind’? — Windows 8 will have two separate interfaces according to recent rumors. — Italian based windows8italia reports that Microsoft's next-generation Windows operating system will be 32-bit and 64-bit with two separate interfaces.
Discussion:
The Next Web, Thanks:nstalnecker
The Smoking Gun:
Porn Site Gave Federal Agents Free Rein — Investigators secretly monitored Free6.com users for 16 months … The operators of a notorious pornography web site granted federal agents administrative access to the site, giving investigators the ability to monitor traffic and public …
Discussion:
The Not-So Private Parts
Jim Dalrymple / The Loop:
Mac App Store launching in January 2011 — Despite published reports to the contrary, Apple's Mac App Store will launch in January 2011. — Reports earlier this week claimed Apple would launch the Mac App Store on December 13, ahead of the holiday shopping season.
Discussion:
AppleInsider, MacRumors, 9 to 5 Mac, TUAW, The Next Web, MacStories and Daring Fireball
James Lindenbaum / Heroku:
The Next Level — What if enterprise apps were built the way you'd build an agile Ruby app? What if they were a pleasure to work with, deploy, and manage? What if big companies could adopt the philosophies of Heroku and the Ruby community? What if your company actually preferred you use Heroku to build apps?
Discussion:
Force.com Blog, GigaOM, Tim Anderson's ITWriting, Computerworld and NewEnterprise
RELATED:
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
Salesforce.com Buys Heroku For $212 Million In Cash
Salesforce.com Buys Heroku For $212 Million In Cash
Discussion:
James Governor's Monkchips, Bloomberg, GigaOM, Irregular Enterprise Blog, PR Newswire, VentureBeat, The Enterprise System …, Force.com Blog, eWeek, Reuters, Between the Lines Blog, Pulse2, internetnews.com, Computerworld, SmoothSpan Blog, SAI, WebProNews, alarm:clock, The Diversity Blog, Mashable!, Under the Radar and ReadWriteWeb
Jonathan S. Geller / BGR:
Best Buy Mobile offering iPhone 3GS for free on December 10th — We just received a tip from a Best Buy ninja of ours, and well, it seems that Radio Shack isn't the only game in town in you're looking for an Apple iPhone. Best Buy will be offering up Apple's iPhone 3GS for free for one day only, this Friday the 10th.
Discussion:
Electronista, The Next Web and Gizmodo
Seth Weintraub / Fortune:
Andy Rubin: Google activates 300,000 phones every day! — Boom! — Andy Rubin just Tweeted that Google (GOOG) is activating 300,000 phones a day. That passes Apple's (AAPL) iOS, that passes Blackberry (RIMM). That even matches any figures that Symbian has ever put up.
Discussion:
GeekSmack, Thanks:markgurman
Om Malik / GigaOM:
The Network Computer Arrives...Finally! — Thank you Eric Schmidt for taking me down memory lane, to the heyday of another bubble, in another century. Today, at the launch of Chrome OS — a new Google operating system for web-centric computing — Schmidt talked about 1997 when he …
Discussion:
eWeek, Forbes, MediaPost, Engadget, Ars Technica, WebProNews, VentureBeat and OStatic blogs, Thanks:ryanlawler
RELATED:
Bloomberg:
Apple, Google Asked to Pay Up as European Operators Inundated by Data — Google Inc., Apple Inc., and Facebook Inc. need to pitch in to help pay for the billions of dollars of network investments needed for their bandwidth-hogging services, European phone operators say.
Discussion:
pocketnow.com, Ars Technica, IntoMobile, The Register, Electronista, 901am, Pulse2, GigaOM, Engadget, ITworld.com, Tech Trader Daily, DSLreports, MacRumors, TechEye, TUAW, CNET News, everythingiCafe, The Loop and Daring Fireball
Eric Engleman / TechFlash:
Intellectual Ventures sues nine tech firms for patent infringement — Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm that's amassed a huge trove of technology patents over the years, has sued nine technology companies for patent infringement. It's the first time Intellectual Ventures …
Discussion:
Bits, Intellectual Ventures Home, Wall Street Journal, Patent Law Blog, Techdirt, The Seattle Times, paidContent, VentureBeat, CNET News, Pulse2 and The Microsoft Blog, Thanks:johnhcook
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
Truly Decentralized BitTorrent Downloading Has Finally Arrived — BitTorrent is a great technology to share files both quickly and efficiently, but like all other P2P-technologies it has an Achilles' heel. The download process relies in part on central servers that can crash or go offline for a variety of reasons.
Kevin May / Tnooz:
Google Places blocked from using TripAdvisor reviews — Now here is an interesting development - Google is no longer able to stream in reviews from TripAdvisor to Places pages after the user review giant blocked it. — TripAdvisor confirmed the move today in an email …
Discussion:
Search Engine Roundtable and Understanding Google …
Matt Idema / Yahoo!'s Yodel Anecdotal:
Yahoo! Gets Hyper-Local — Here at Yahoo! we are constantly redefining how people experience and interact with content on the Web. Users today want to go beyond words presented on the screen. They want videos. They want social activity. They want it anywhere and anytime.
Discussion:
Y! Mobile Blog, Bits, PC Magazine, paidContent, SAI, GigaOM, The Toybox Blog, IntoMobile, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch
Bill Rigby / Reuters:
Google says shut out of USDA cloud computing deal — (Reuters) - Google Inc didn't get the chance to compete for the largest federal government “cloud computing” deal yet announced, according to the Web firm, adding to its concerns that government agencies are unfairly favoring rival Microsoft Corp.
Discussion:
WinRumors