Internet & Media

Police officers in Newsweek Bitcoin story confirm Nakamoto quote

Here's the latest in a bizarre, winding saga sparked Thursday by a Newsweek cover story that alleged it had found the man who created Bitcoin: The police officers present for an important verbal exchange said the account as written by Newsweek reporter Leah McGrath Goodman is accurate.

In her story, Goodman described a scene outside the home of Dorian S. Nakamoto, the man purported to be the founder of Bitcoin, the crypto-currency. Nakamoto had called the police after Goodman came to his door, and the officers were there when he supposedly uttered this key quote: "I am no … Read more

Instagram inks its first advertising agency deal

Just five months after delivering its first official advertisements, Instagram has a made a believer out of Omnicon Group, a top-tier advertising and marketing agency with more than 5,000 clients.

The agency has signed a one-year contract with Instagram, an Instagram spokesperson told CNET on Friday. The partnership marks the first agency deal for Instagram and signifies the seriousness of the smartphone application's intention to turn the photo and video app, used by more than 150 million people each month, into a lucrative business.

The deal, which comes with creative guidance from Instagram, was first reported by AdAge. … Read more

Google doodle celebrates International Women's Day

You might wake up on Saturday and imagine it's just another Saturday.

How could you forget it's International Women's Day?

The feast of March 8 was originally celebrated in Eastern Europe as International Working Women's Day, a positively cheery hosanna to women who worked the fields and stood in meat queues, while the men drank themselves silly.

It has since been expanded to be a worldwide lean-in for which some people wear purple ribbons.

Google's doodlers have leaped to join the celebration a day early.

This, I am sure, has nothing to do with recent … Read more

Benioff sets up SF philanthropic program for tech firms

Marc Benioff is taking the lead in repairing the technology industry's embattled image in San Francisco.

On Friday, the gregarious Salesforce chief executive announced an initiative to raise $10 million over the next 60 days for Bay Area antipoverty programs. The program will be called SF Gives, a joint effort with the nonprofit The Tipping Point.

"We don't want to be the industry that looks like 'The Wolf of Wall Street,'" he told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We want to be more benevolent."

The program will at first call on 20 companies to contribute $… Read more

20,000km undersea cable to link Singapore to Europe

The Sea-Me-We 5 consortium, a group of 15 telecommunications companies, has awarded Alcatel-Lucent and NEC a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars to lay an undersea cable that will bring a high-speed network link between Europe and Singapore and points in between.

The South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe (Sea-Me-We) consortium is funding the 20,000-kilometer (12,400 miles) cable, the fifth such project for the consortium. This one will bring a 100-gigabit-per-second link, Alcatel-Lucent said Friday.

Alcatel-Lucent will lay the western stretch from Europe to Sri Lanka, with spurs leading to Sicily, Pakistan, India, and various Middle Eastern countries. … Read more

We are sooo getting trolled by Satoshi Nakamoto right now

The ongoing bitstorm over Newsweek's claimed outing of mysterious Bitcoin godfather Satoshi Nakamoto, which was later rebuked by the subject of that report, is beginning to resemble a mashup of a futuristic manga thriller and an Andy Kaufman prank. The latest chapter in the crypto-currency commedia dell'arte seems to have the "real" Satoshi Nakamoto behind Bitcoin breaking a years-long silence to also dispute the Newsweek report.… Read more

Samsung's answer to Apple's iTunes Radio: Milk Music

Samsung is taking on Apple's iTunes Radio, as well as Pandora, Spotify, and a host of other companies in the competitive streaming music business, but it picked an innocuous name to do it.

Milk Music, launched Friday and available now in the Google Play store, is Samsung's latest foray into a music service, this time a streaming radio offering.

It's free to download and free to listen to, and importantly, unlike iTunes Radio, it doesn't have ads.

But the company is entering a competitive field. Streaming is the music industry's area of greatest growth, but … Read more

Verizon offers discount to wireless and Fios triple-play customers

Here's some good news for Verizon Fios and Verizon Wireless customers. If you have a smartphone on Verizon Wireless and you subscribe to the Verizon Fios triple play, you can save $20 on your monthly fees.

Verizon's offer starts today and runs until April 19. The so-called unified customer "thank you" offer allows customers to save $480 over two years just by using qualified services and registering for the savings.

The only "catch" to the deal is the level of service a user is subscribed to. In order to qualify, a Verizon Wireless subscriber … Read more

Twitter paid $36 million for IBM patents to avoid a lawsuit

Twitter paid a hefty sum for a group of patents acquired from IBM, according to a newly published Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Twitter paid $36 million to acquire more than 900 patents from IBM, shows the filing published Thursday by the government agency. IBM announced the agreement between the companies in January, though the transaction was actually completed in December. As of the end of last year, Twitter had a total of 956 patents and 100 patent applications, according to the filing.

Last year, IBM was banging the drums of possible patent-infringement against Twitter, saying that the company's … Read more