October 28, 2013 06:00 PDT | 09:00 EDT | 13:00 UTC
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>> DRIVING THE DAY: Final estimates for Apple's Q4 2013, by Philip Elmer-DeWitt: "The consensus among the 48 analysts we've heard from -- 27 pros and 21 amateurs -- is that revenues were up (about 3%) in fiscal Q4 and earnings down (about 6%) year over year... We'll find out who was nearest the mark in each category when Apple reports its earnings after the markets close on Monday." Fortune
>> WASHINGTON WIRE: Protesters call for an end to NSA mass surveillance, by Grant Gross: "A crowd of about 5,000 people, chanting 'stop spying, stop lying' and 'hey, ho, mass surveillance has got to go,' marched through Washington, D.C., Saturday to protest the U.S. National Security Agency's mass surveillance programs. Protesters, from a seemingly wide range of political beliefs, called on the U.S. Congress and President Barack Obama to end mass data collection and surveillance by the NSA." Computerworld
>>>> Spain targeted, Obama 'knew' of Merkel bug, and Japan wouldn't aid China tap GigaOM
>>>> The NSA's secret spy hub in Berlin Der Spiegel
>>>> Obama unaware as US spied on world leaders: Officials [coining a new term: 'implausible deniability'] Wall Street Journal (paywalled)
>>>> There's more than one way to uncover state secrets InfoWorld
>> PRO TIP: Benchmark's Fenton and New Relic's Cirne talk about democratization of data (Video), by Kara Swisher: "App management in the enterprise is perhaps not the most lively of topics, but I did what turned out to be a very entertaining interview with New Relic's CEO and co-founder Lew Cirne at its FutureStack13 conference last week." AllThingsD
>> BUBBLE WATCH: Silicon Valley: Feel the froth, by Rolfe Winkler, Matt Jarzemsky: "It isn't quite 1999, when dot-com companies with scant revenue made initial public offerings and tripled in price on their first days of trading. When that bubble popped in 2000, scores of companies went bust, and millions of small investors suffered losses. Now, shares of Internet companies are soaring again, and signs of pre-2000 exuberance can be seen in Silicon Valley and the nearby area. Home prices in San Francisco and surrounding counties rose more than 15% in the past year. Office rents in San Francisco are 23% above their 2008 peak." Wall Street Journal (paywalled)
>>>> Behind Twitter's $11B valuation New Yorker
>>>> Pinterest: "Nobody's paying for anything yet. We want to see how things go." Slate
>>>> Are eager investors overvaluing tech start-ups? NYTimes Disruptions
>> FIRST LOOK: Mozilla sheds a light(beam) on Web privacy, by Serdar Yegulalp: "Mozilla has long considered itself a champion of the free and open Web, and plans to walk the walk as much as it talks the talk. The company's latest and best foot forward in that direction: Lightbeam for Firefox.... This Firefox add-on shows, graphically, how the sites you visit interact with other sites -- and how tracking information may be gathered in the process, often from multiple sites at once without your knowledge." InfoWorld
>>>> Lightbeam for Firefox add-on Mozilla download
>> FACT OF LIFE: The Internet is a 'US colony,' by Shona Ghosh: "Web users are vulnerable to mass online spying because the US has too much power online, according to a leading security researcher. Discussing revelations of US spying at his LinuxCon keynote speech, F-Secure's chief research officer Mikko Hypponen argued that US dominance over the internet had come at the expense of democracy. 'We're back in the age of colonisation,' said Hypponen. 'We should think about the Americans as our masters.' Hypponen gave a point-by-point attack against assertions that online spying was necessary, arguing that its dominance over the web gave the US too much power over foreign countries." PC Pro UK
>>>> The battle for power on the Internet The Atlantic
>> FLOATING HYPOTHESIS: Massive barge on San Francisco Bay likely secret Google facility, by Allen Martin: "The barge, with a four-story stack of shipping containers, is out in the open for all to see. But the project's purpose has been kept under wraps, and virtually no one wants to talk about it for the record... KPIX 5 has learned that Google is actually building a floating marketing center, a kind of giant Apple store, if you will -- but for Google Glass, the cutting-edge wearable computer the company has under development." CBS San Francisco
>> CRIMES & MISDEMEANORS: Avast, me hearties! Antigua to legally pirate US copyrighted works, by Mark Gibbs: "Antigua to legally ignore US copyright to the tune of $21M per year... In 2003 Antigua started proceedings with the World Trade Organization ('WTO') challenging the United States' total prohibition on cross-border online gambling services and they won... when the US appealed the verdict the judgement was upheld. The US was given one year to correct its laws but ... and most of us will find little to surprise us here ... our country did nothing of the sort. We became international scofflaws. Thereafter some ugly diplomacy ensued that saw the US try to wriggle out of its original WTO agreement but the WTO would have none of it. On January 28 this year... the WTO authorized Antigua to suspend US copyrights... Antigua can do as it pleases with US copyrights and US copyright holders can't do jack about it." NetworkWorld
>> TAX-DEDUCTIBLE CHARITY ORGANIZATION: Amazon and the 'profitless business model' fallacy, by Eugene Wei: "If I were an Amazon competitor, I'd actually regard Amazon's current run of quarterly losses as a terrifying signal. It means Amazon is arming itself to take the contest to higher ground. The retail game is about to become more, not less, punishing." Remains of the Day
>> BRAVE NEW WORLD: 38% of children under 2 use mobile media, by Meg Wagner: "Nearly two in five children have used a tablet or smartphone before they could speak in full sentences, according to a new report.... Conducted by family advocacy organization Common Sense Media, the study found that 38% of children under the age of 2 have used a mobile device for playing games, watching videos or other media-related purposes. In 2011, only 10% had.... By the age of 8, 72% of children have used a smartphone, tablet or similar device." Mashable
>> WAYBACK MACHINE: Internet Archive, fearful of spying, boosts its encryption, by Zach Miners: "The nonprofit announced new privacy protections to make it more difficult to see users' reading behavior on the site... Web servers typically record IP addresses in their logs, which leaves a record to reconstruct who looked at what, but the Internet Archive has been trying to avoid keeping users' IP addresses for the past several years." PCWorld
>>>> Historical Software Archive lets you use vintage software in your browser PCWorld
>> Seagate cooks up game-changing cloud storage hardware InfoWorld
>> Douglas Hofstadter: The man who would teach machines to think The Atlantic
>> SoftLayer CEO: A very Big Blue cloud is coming InfoWorld
>> Message unread: BBM for iPhone and Android review The Verge
>> First Tizen tablet ships to developers LinuxGizmos
>> LinkedIn's Intro tool for iPhones could be a juicy target for attackers ITWorld
>> Meet the "Google of China" that Google can't buy Bloomberg TV
>> World's first Bitcoin ATM set to go live Tuesday Wired
>> APPRECIATION: Lou Reed Rolling Stone
>> TWEET O' THE DAY: "Apple's best bet for long-term success is to quit the hardware business and license the Mac to Dell, Gartner claimed on a Tuesday in 2006." @asymco
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