Techmeme
December 15, 2013, 12:00 AM

Top News

John Markoff / New York Times:
Google acquires Boston Dynamics, maker of BigDog, Petman, and other research robots  —  Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots  —  SAN FRANCISCO — BigDog, Cheetah, WildCat and Atlas have joined Google's growing robot menagerie.  —  Google confirmed on Friday that it had completed …
New York Times:
Officials Say U.S. May Never Know Extent of Snowden's Leaks  —  WASHINGTON — American intelligence and law enforcement investigators have concluded that they may never know the entirety of what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden extracted from classified government computers …
Yoree Koh / Digits:
Twitter Test Shows ‘Nearby’ Tweets  —  Twitter has an eye on your location — and is testing ways to share it with other nearby users.  —  The short-messaging service appears to be testing a new timeline for its mobile app, called “Nearby.”  It shows recent nearby tweets, whether you follow the tweeter or not.
Cyrus Farivar / Ars Technica:
Boston Police indefinitely suspends license plate reader program  —  The Boston Police Department currently has 14 license plate scanners, which are often mounted on police cars.  —  cle0patra  —  The Boston Police Department (BPD) has indefinitely halted its use of license plate readers …
Brendan O'Connor / The Awl:
The Golden Era Of Spam Comments Has Ended  —  The search engine optimization community has spent the last two years in a panic.  SEO people flood our Internet with spam links and fake Twitter bots and paid traffic, to help bad websites look more popular than they are, to deliver fake viewers to web ads.
Casey Johnston / Ars Technica:
Instagram senders can delete their messages from recipients' phones  —  The Instagram Direct interface, which allows you to share photos directly to a subset of those you follow, rather than to all your followers.  —  The surface read of Instagram's announcement of a messaging-like feature today was a bit underwhelming.
Jennifer Golbeck / Slate:
Facebook collects metadata on “self-censorship”, updates you begin typing but don't publish  —  Facebook wants to know why you didn't publish that status update you started writing  —  Facebook wants to know why you didn't publish that status update you started writing.

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