Techmeme
January 29, 2012, 8:15 AM

Top News

Sebastian Anthony / ExtremeTech:
Firefox 12 will feature long-awaited New Tab Page and Home Tab  —  After a long gestation period, it now appears that Firefox 12 — which moves to the Aurora channel at the end of the month — will feature the long-awaited New Tab Page and Home Tab.  The new tab page is very like Chrome's feature of the same name.
Jennifer Granick / The Shout:
Megaupload: A Lot Less Guilty Than You Think  —  The recent Department of Justice decision to indict Megaupload for copyright infringement and related offenses raises some very thorny questions from a criminal law perspective.  A few preliminaries: I'm responsible for the musings below …
Enigmax / TorrentFreak:
Mega Aftermath: Upheaval In Pirate Warez Land  —  Despite its “rogue site” status and various other warnings, when MegaUpload went down last week it still came as a shock.  —  But what came next was unprecedented, a dramatic reaction in cyberlocker land that took out vast libraries of digital content and capacity.
More: rc3.org
Jolie O'Dell / VentureBeat:
Pass the popcorn: Y Combinator startup caught stealing from 37signals  —  Here's some developer drama for your Saturday morning: Curebit, a Y Combinator startup that just closed a round of funding from Dave McClure's 500 Startups fund, has been caught red-handed stealing HTML code, images, and the like from 37signals.
Mary Riddell / Telegraph:
Bill Gates: ‘I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying.  He kept it by his bed’  —  People's plutocrat Bill Gates talks about friendly rivalry, and how to get bankers to part with their money.  —  Change the world: 'If you have a dream and it comes true, it's a very cool thing,' says Bill Gates
Cade Metz / Wired Enterprise:
Google Reincarnates Dead Paper Mill as Data Center of Future  —  Google's Finland data center is the ultimate metaphor for the Internet Age (Photos: Google)  —  Joe Kava found himself on the southern coast of Finland, sending robotic cameras down an underground tunnel that stretched into the Baltic Sea.
Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:
Someone Finally Makes “S**t Silicon Valley Says”  —  After an onslaught of “S**t [blank] Says” videos in my Facebook Newsfeed, I appealed to Twitter yesterday, surprised that the industry that invented YouTube hadn't weighed in on the phenomenon.  —  Little did I know that husband …
David Beren / TmoNews:
T-Mobile To Offer Additional Unlocked iPhone Support Beginning January 30th  —  Starting on January 30th, T-Mobile will “begin offering additional support to customers using an Apple iPhone on our network.”  T-Mobile's added iPhone support will include “common procedures …
Paul Sawers / The Next Web:
Brands may be paying celebrities for tweets, but who's paying Twitter?  —  It seems you can't even post a photo of yourself eating a chocolate bar on Twitter these days without kicking up a stink.  —  On Tuesday, Manchester United and (former?)  England defender Rio Ferdinand …
Michael Geist Blog:
The ACTA Fight Returns: What Is at Stake and What You Can Do  —  The reverberations from the SOPA fight continue to be felt in the U.S. (excellent analysis from Benkler and Downes) and elsewhere (mounting Canadian concern that Bill C-11 could be amended to adopt SOPA-like rules) …
Sarah Lacy / PandoDaily:
That Was Fast: Betaworks Returns All Capital... And Then Some  —  The New York tech scene has certainly received a lot of hype, but a lot of people are waiting for results that prove it's more than just that.  Proof that New York is really a tech ecosystem that is here to stay, no matter what may happen to Foursquare and Gilt.
Heather Kelly / VentureBeat:
Macworld finds its footing as a “hardcore consumer lifestyle event”  —  Macworld Expo, a once powerful Mac tradeshow, is getting new life as smaller event for Apple consumers and fans.  The revamped three-day event, now called Macworld |  iWorld, is taking place this week in San Francisco.

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