March 6, 2014 06:00 PST | 09:00 EST | 14:00 UTC
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>> KEYSER SOZE: The face behind bitcoin, by Leah McGrath Goodman: "Satoshi Nakamoto stands at the end of his sunbaked driveway looking timorous. And annoyed.... He's wearing a rumpled T-shirt, old blue jeans and white gym socks, without shoes, like he has left the house in a hurry. His hair is unkempt, and he has the thousand-mile stare of someone who has gone weeks without sleep.... He stands not with defiance, but with the slackness of a person who has waged battle for a long time and now faces a grave loss.... Two police officers from the Temple City, Calif., sheriff's department flank him, looking puzzled. 'So, what is it you want to ask this man about?' one of them asks me. 'He thinks if he talks to you he's going to get into trouble....' 'I don't think he's in any trouble,' I say. 'I would like to ask him about Bitcoin. This man is Satoshi Nakamoto....' 'What?' The police officer balks. 'This is the guy who created Bitcoin? It looks like he's living a pretty humble life.' Newsweek
> AMD, ATI cash in as crypto currency craze eats up video cards InfoWorld
> CrossCoin Ventures launches first Ripple cryptocurrency/exchange startup accelerator GigaOM
> Bitcoin exchange boss, Autumn Radtke, found dead of suspected suicide in Singapore News Corp Australia
> Native American tribes adopt bitcoin-like currency, prepare to battle US government The Verge
> Implosion of bitcoin exchange spawns mutant digital currency Wired
> Congressman calls to ban U.S. dollar in response to plea for bitcoin ban TechCrunch >> ROTTEN APPLE: How Ireland got Apple's $9B profit, by Neil Chenoweth: "Apple has shifted an estimated $8.9 billion in untaxed profits from its Australian operations to a tax haven structure in Ireland in the last decade... Last year Apple reported pretax earnings in Australia of only $88.5 million after it sent an estimated $2 billion of income from its Australian sales to Ireland via Singapore, where Apple negotiated a secret tax deal in 2009. The Financial Review has obtained 10 years worth of financial accounts for Apple Sales International, the secretive Irish company at the heart of Apple's international tax arrangements, which reveal the mark-up Apple charges for intellectual property on its products around the world." Australian Financial Review
> Setback for Apple: U.S. judge denies renewed bid for permanent injunction against Samsung FOSS Patents
>> BEHIND THE CURTAIN: Microsoft's Nadella manages legacy of Ballmer-board split, by Dina Bass, Beth Jinks, Peter Burrows: "Before the announcement in August that [Ballmer] would be retiring, some Microsoft directors were so exasperated they talked about how they might ease him out, including by hiring someone he admired, Ford CEO Alan Mulally, to succeed him... Mulally later fell out of favor when members viewed him as behaving as though the job should be handed to him without so much as a formal interview... Ballmer's relations with the board hit a low when he shouted at a June meeting that if he didn't get his way he couldn't be CEO... flare-up was over his proposed purchase of most of Nokia, and part of an ongoing debate: Should Microsoft be a software company or a hardware company too? Gates... initially balked at the move into making smartphones... So, at first, did Nadella, signaling his position in a straw poll to gauge executives' reaction to the deal. Nadella later changed his mind." BloombergBusinessweek
> Steve Ballmer's temper tantrum over Nokia buyout led to his firing Computerworld
> The acquisition that cost Steve Ballmer his job Pando
> BTW: Ballmer is about to become Microsoft's largest shareholder.
>> NEWS NEWS: News reader company Flipboard buys rival Zite from CNN, by Jennifer Saba: "The deal is valued at $60 million, according to the CNN Money website. A CNN spokesman called the valuation 'inaccurate' but declined to give details. Time Warner's CNN bought Zite, a news reader application that aggregates content for tablets like Apple Inc's iPad in 2011, for around $20 million." Reuters
> CNN said to get Flipboard stake in sale of Zite Bloomberg
> More on Flipboard's acquisition of Zite: 'The deal whisperer', Zite's fate, the price tag, and Paper TechCrunch
> Business Insider raises new round; valued at $100M Reuters
> Fact checking The New York Times and Redfin: Remember the story about San Francisco houses going for 60 to 80% above asking price? It's '100% inaccurate.' NYTimes has issued a retraction. Priceonomics >> DEPARTURE LOUNGE: Target tech chief resigns as it overhauls security, by Anne d'Innocenzio: "Target Corp.'s executive ranks have suffered their first casualty since hackers stole credit card numbers and other personal data of millions of the retailer's shoppers last year. The nation's second largest discounter told The Associated Press that Beth Jacob, who has overseen everything from Target's web site to its internal computer systems as chief information officer since 2008, has resigned... The company said last week that its fourth-quarter profit fell 46 percent on a revenue decline of 5.3 percent as the breach scared off customers." AP via Yahoo
> CIO not the only one to blame for Target breach Computerworld
> Target CIO resignation puts retail CIOs on alert CIO >> DARK CIRCLES: Tor network used to hide 900 botnets and darknet markets, says Kaspersky Lab, by John E Dunn: "Tor has long had its dark side but the scale of its use by criminals appears to have expanded quite rapidly in the last year. Kaspersky Lab had uncovered evidence of 900 services using Tor, said researcher Sergey Lozhkin, through its 5,500 plus nodes (server relays) and 1,000 exit nodes (servers from which traffic emerges). A particular niche was the rise of underground markets that use Tor to hide their activity. 'It all started from the notorious Silk Road market and evolved to dozens of specialist markets: drugs, arms and, of course, malware,' said Lozhkin." Techworld
> TechBrief fun facts: Tor was originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Lab, then by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Today it's funded by the U.S. State Department and the National Science Foundation, drawing 80 percent of its funding from the U.S. government.
>> IPTV: DirecTV in talks with Disney on deal for Internet rights, by Ronald Grover, Liana Baker: "DirecTV is in talks with Walt Disney Co to license the rights to offer Disney's broadcast and cable channels as part of an Internet-based product, DirecTV said on Wednesday. The deal would mirror a first-of-its kind agreement that Disney and satellite rival Dish Network Corp announced earlier this week. The Internet rights being discussed are part of a large-scale programming agreement that would replace a deal between the companies that expires in late December." Reuters
>> Founders Fund hits $1B mark for new venture-capital fund Wall Street Journal/Digits
>> Nasdaq finally launches its market for privately-held companies TechCrunch
>> IPO dot-com bubble echo seen muted as older companies go public Bloomberg
>> Salesforce bundles Force.com and Heroku as part of new enterprise push CITEWorld
>> US school offers first-of-a-kind graduate degree in data center engineering PCWorld
>> Red Hat to take on Microsoft with .Net hosted service InfoWorld
>> SAP adds subscription pricing for Hana cloud services InfoWorld
>> Get real, IDC -- PC sales will plummet in 2014 InfoWorld
>> Short-term profit taking vs. long-term value creation: The Future of PayPal Reid Hoffman, on Linkedin
>> End of Windows XP support survey results: Users simply don't care Spamfighter
>> Getty Images makes 35 million images free in fight against copyright infringement British Journal of Photography
>> Facebook changes gun policies to crack down on illegal sales TechHive
>> A vast hidden surveillance network runs across America, powered by the repo industry BetaBoston
>> Tracking with metadata: It's not all bad InfoWorld
>> And the world's most expensive city is… Wall Street Journal
>> BITCOIN: $674 Coinbase
>> TWEET O' THE DAY: 'Local joke here: Russian arrives at airport in some country. Immigration officer says, "Occupation?" Russian responds, "No, just visiting."' @TerryMoran
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