Techmeme: Adobe Flash update puts users in charge of privacy (Robert McMillan/Computerworld)

12:10 PM ET, May 13, 2011

Top Items:

John Brownlee / Cult of Mac:

Indie iOS Devs Under Legal Fire For Offering In-App Purchases [Breaking] — The lead developer behind the popular Mac dock replacement DragThing and the fantastic iOS scientific calculator app pCalc is about to be sued for patent infringement because his software uses Apple's own in-app purchasing mechanism.

Discussion: GigaOM, SAI, App Advice, Hardware 2.0 Blog, Electronista, PadGadget, TeleRead, SlashGear, The Next Web and iClarified

Eric Slivka / MacRumors:

Lodsys Threatens to Sue App Store Developers Over In-App Purchases and Upgrade Links — Yesterday, we received word from Rob Gloess of Computer LogicX, the company behind the Mix & Mash and Mix & Mash LITE applications for iOS, that he had received legal documents threatening a patent lawsuit …

Discussion: Macworld, MacStories, TiPb, TUAW, iLounge, TidBITS, iPhone Download Blog, Evolver.fm and Cult of Mac

Chris Rawson / TUAW:

Samsung announces 2560 x 1600 display, could pave the way for iPad 3 — Samsung will demonstrate an all-new 10.1-inch display at the SID Display Week 2011 International Symposium next week. Samsung's new display will have a 2560 x 1600 resolution, far in excess of anything on the tablet market today.

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

Facebook, You're Going To Need A Better Answer For Your Slimeball Stunt — At this point, I think it's pretty clear what Facebook's strategy for this whole Burson-Marsteller caught-with-their-pants-down situation is going to be: say as little as possible and move on. And it will work.

Discussion: @anildash, Softpedia News, Changing Way and Silicon Valley Watcher, more at Mediagazer »

Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
How Facebook Enables The Google Social “Scraping” It's Upset About

Discussion: Naked Security, Search Engine Roundtable, SEO Book.com, Epicenter, InfoWorld, VentureBeat, Mashable!, Nicke's shared items … and Search Engine Land, Thanks:sidharthdassani

Paul Reynolds / Consumer Reports News:

Will Amazon make a tablet? ‘Stay tuned,’ says Jeff Bezos — Asked today about the possibility of Amazon launching a multipurpose tablet device, the company's president and CEO Jeff Bezos said to “stay tuned” on the company's plans. In an interview at Consumer Reports' offices …

Ben Brooks / The Brooks Review:

The Ballmer Days Are Over — Disclaimer: I own Microsoft stock. Yes, this is not pro-Microsoft but I feel the need to be very open about this. — He's employee number 30 and has been with Microsoft since mid-1980. In 2000, after nearly 20 years of service, Microsoft promoted Steve Ballmer to Chief Executive Officer.

Discussion: MacDailyNews

John Boudreau / Seattle Times:

Young Chinese developers hit jackpot via App Store — Lu Miao speaks very little English. He's never traveled outside Asia. He's not a software engineer. But in a few short months, he became the founder of a successful software company selling apps in the U.S. and Europe.

John Cook / GeekWire:

A Twitter crime thriller, and why laptop tracking could save you some heartache — I got hooked tonight on an amazing Twitter drama, watching in real time as Sean Power live Tweeted about his attempts to recover his stolen laptop from a guy in a bar in New York City.

Discussion: Gizmodo, @seanpower and TechCrunch

Ariel Schwartz / Fast Company:

Cell Phones Are Killing The Bees: Study — New experiments find that cell phone signals don't just confuse bees, they off them. What does this mean for our food supply? — Do you enjoy eating? Then you may not be too happy if bee populations plunge. That's because out of the 100 crops …

Discussion: Yahoo! News, DialToSave, Mashable!, FM Blog and The Toybox Blog

Jim Finkle / Reuters:

Cisco braces for biggest layoffs in its history — * Could be biggest layoff in company's 26-year history — Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O) is expected to cut thousands of jobs in possibly its worst-ever round of layoffs to meet Chief Executive John Chambers' goal of slashing costs by $1 billion.

Discussion: NewEnterprise, VentureBeat and PC Magazine

Nathan Brown / Edge Online:

PSN Outage Begins To Hit Retail — Gamer patience begins to wear thin as retailers report increased trade-ins of PS3 consoles for Xbox 360s. — The ongoing PlayStation Network outage is beginning to have an effect on the high street, Edge can reveal. — Our sources indicate a growing trend …

Discussion: VentureBeat, Fast Company, Electronista, ITProPortal, HEXUS.channel, The Register, SlashGear, GamePolitics News, TechSpot and Pocket-lint

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Hulu, Networks Close To New Deal — Hulu and its network TV owners are close to a new deal that will keep programs from NBC, Fox and ABC on the Web video site. — An agreement to extend the content licenses that owners News Corp., Disney and NBCUniversal signed two years ago …

Discussion: Betabeat, WebProNews, GigaOM, SAI, Pulse2 and Electronista, more at Mediagazer »

Kelly Hodgkins / Gizmodo:

Samsung's Foldable Display Will Let You Stuff Giant Tablets in Your Pants — Tiny tablets' major advantage over the 10-inch crowd: They'll fit in your pocket (especially if you're the type of person who wears cargo pants). Samsung's latest foldable, creaseless AMOLED display will let you fold …

Discussion: SAI, I4U News, PhysOrg.com, SlashGear, Fast Company, OLED-Info and Samsung Hub

Jack Purcher / Patently Apple:

Apple to Advance iPhone with both Text-to-Speech & Speech-to-Text Converters — According to a new Apple patent application that was published this morning by the US Patent and Trademark Office, future iPhone's are likely to provide end users with effective new ways of communicating …

Discussion: Mashable!, TUAW and WebProNews

Kellex / Droid Life:

DROIDX2 Launching May 26th with Dual-core Processor, qHD Screen and Gingerbread — The Motorola DROIDX2 was rumored to originally be scheduled to release today, but with the push back of the DROID Charge, we were wondering if it hadn't been pushed back as well. According to Verizon, that is definitely the case.

Discussion: BGR, I4U News, MobileCrunch, ITProPortal, IntoMobile, Softpedia News, Engadget, PhoneArena, wirelessgoodness.com and Android Phone Fans

Ed Bott / Ed Bott's Microsoft Report Blog:

Google's Blogger outage makes the case against a cloud-only strategy — The same week that Google made its strongest pitch ever for putting your entire business online, one of its flagship services has failed spectacularly. — Earlier this week, Google rolled out a maintenance release for its Blogger service.

Discussion: NetworkEffect and PC World

Liz Gannes / NetworkEffect:
Blogger Goes Down, Taking 30 Hours of Posts and Comments With It

Discussion: Netcraft, Techland, Pulse2, Softpedia News, Guardian and ReadWriteWeb

Jon Boone / Guardian:

Taliban join the Twitter revolution — Tweets about attacks on ‘infidel forces’ give Taliban new weapon in Afghanistan's information war — When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, they eschewed most modern technology, including television and music players. — But in the latest sign …

Discussion: VentureBeat, Pulse2, Epicenter, The Daily Caller, Digital Trends and Mashable!

David Segal / New York Times:

Online Seller Who Bullied Customers Pleads Guilty — The online eyeglasses seller who terrified customers in the hopes of creating buzz about his Web site, and raising its profile in Google searches, pleaded guilty on Thursday to two counts of sending threatening communications, one count of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud.

Discussion: PC World, Betabeat, Marketing Pilgrim, Search Engine Land and Pulse2

Tom Foremski / Silicon Valley Watcher:

Fantastic Insight Into The Closed Box Google Culture From A Recent Xoogler — Douwe Osinga, a software engineer, recently left Google after seven years. He's written a series of blog posts explaining why he left and also describing what it was like working there, and he dispels some of the many myths about Google.

Nathan Olivarez-Giles / L.A. Times Tech Blog:

Boston developer wants cut of Winklevoss twins' $65-million Facebook settlement — A Boston software developer has been awarded a day in court to make his case for a cut of the Winklevoss twins' $65-million settlement with Facebook, according to a report. — Developer Wayne Chang has argued …

Discussion: LAW.com and Pulse2

Robert McMillan / Computerworld:

Adobe Flash update puts users in charge of privacy — IDG News Service - Adobe has released an important update to its Flash Player software that fixes critical security flaws and gives users a better way of controlling whether they are being tracked on the Web.

DigiCha:

Have Facebook Executives Used The Media To Ruin Mark Zuckerberg's China Dream? — Brad Stone of BusinessWeek has written a long and glowing profile of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in which Stone reveals that Sandberg and CEO Mark Zuckerberg disagree on the wisdom of entering China:

Kashmir Hill / The Not-So Private Parts:

Your Marital Status Is Worth $0.01 To Data-Buyers, Your Smartphone Is Worth $0.03 — We often hear about how our personal information is being bought and sold on the Internet on a regular basis. So you probably won't be surprised to get another reminder of that.

Om Malik / Om.Is.Me:

Skype and Story of My life — I has been nearly six years since I first fell in love with Skype. It was a tiny little company with a buggy software and a few thousand users. I liked it so much that I started forcing my friends to sign up for it. Many of them resisted, but I persisted.

Josh Constine / Inside Facebook:

Facebook Partners with Web of Trust to Protect Users From Malicious Outbound Links — Web of Trust, a crowd-sourced website reputation rating service, has partnered with Facebook to protect user from clicking malicious outbound links on the social network. When users click a link to a site …

Discussion: Naked Security, Facebook, Softpedia News, gHacks Technology News and ReadWriteWeb

Andrew Song / Facebook:
Introducing Login Approvals

Discussion: PC Magazine, ReadWriteWeb, Geek.com and Lifehacker

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