Paul Davis... pointed to a comment he had made on a Web site defending Bezos’s interest in the newspaper. “If anyone really thinks that Bezos himself is motivated by venal greed and a petty desire to increase his own personal wealth . . . I can’t prove you wrong, but I will say that I think that you’re deluded,” Davis wrote. “It could be that nearly two decades of astounding richness have warped his underlying motivations and morals, but I suspect that they are still pretty much what they were in 1994 — phenomenally driven, able to shrug through moral ambiguity, and always fixated on the big goals and the grand schemes.”...

Since his deal to purchase The Washington Post was announced, newspaper readers who have found Bezos’s e-mail address have started to pepper him with questions, and Bezos, true to his reputation for customer service, has been responding....

A man who had paid several hundred dollars to place a marriage announcement did not like how the paper treated him. He wrote to Bezos saying, “Thank god you’re getting involved, you understand customer service!” Weymouth wrote back to the man, but within “two seconds,” so did Bezos. “Thank you for your input,” Bezos told him. “Keep your ideas coming!” - Peter Whoriskey, Washington Post

The court decision here ends with the following statement:

"More than a decade ago, the Beckman Instruments court foretold, "we can certainly imagine a case in which litigation misconduct would justify an award of attorney fees for the entire litigation." Beckman Instruments, Inc. v. LBK Produkter AB, 892 F.2d 1547 (Fed. Cir. 1989). We are quite confident that this was the kind of case it had in mind." - Patently O

Marquis de Lafayette, 18
James Monroe, 18
Gilbert Stuart, 20
Aaron Burr, 20
Alexander Hamilton, 21
Betsy Ross, 24
James Madison, 25 - Kottke

That was the theory, anyway, when I arrived from Fort Lauderdale on July 22 and showed the device to U.S. Army escorts. They’re from the Kentucky and Indiana National Guard and work as Army journalists writing stories and press releases and taking pictures for the prison staff newsletter, The Wire.

Given our parallel professions they reacted just as I expected — they were psyched. They stared at the device. They tried it out. We were inside a wooden shed built in a dilapidated aircraft hangar, far from anything remotely sensitive. So they clowned around for the camera.

It was downhill from there. Army Lt. Col. Samuel House, acting public affairs director, said the command staff was suspicious and forbade me from taking it anywhere near the detention center zone, a decision I hope they’ll revisit in the future. - Carl Rosenberg, Miami Herald

Whether it be an Exchange instance, a Postfix configuration, or a Sendmail setup, it's the only way to be sure that your information is not being read, sold onward, or crunched in some massively large big data project. - Chris Duckett, ZDNet

server authentication
code signing
time stamping

Other certificate usages of the MD5 signature hash algorithm will not be blocked.

As for code signing, we will allow for signed binaries that were signed before March 2009 to continue to work, even if the signing cert used MD5 signature hash algorithm. - Microsoft

That's not to say there's a shortage of pretty innovative software features, but they're coming almost exclusively from six miles north of Cupertino.

In its mad dash to out-innovate Apple, Google has surpassed the tech giant not only in market share, but also in app store downloads and software that's as impressive as it is essential. At this point, many of the best apps on an iPhone come courtesy of Google: Gmail, Google Now, Google Maps, Google Chrome, Google Drive, and others are arguably better than iOS's default offerings. And the polish that Mountain View has given its Android OS has been noticeably popping up in various iterations of iOS. (Control Center, anyone?)

And that's to say nothing about Google Glass or Chromecast.

Google has taken the market-leading reins and made Apple look less innovative than we know it can be.

[PJ: Incidentally, this is why the FairSearch complaint to the EU Commission about bundling is so silly. Of *course* you find Google apps on Android phones. People want the best, and this article states clearly that the best apps are from Google.] - Mike Schuster, Minyanville

“What Defendants knew, but failed to disclose to investors ... was that Microsoft’s foray into the tablet market was an unmitigated disaster, which left it with a large accumulation of excess, overvalued Surface RT inventory,” the lawsuit says [PDF]. - Janet I. Tu, Seattle Times

Rose: But you think they’re evil?

Ellison: I think what they did was absolutely evil.

Rose: And you blame Larry Page?

Ellison: 100 percent Larry Page.

Rose: So if what they did is evil, that makes Larry Page evil.

Ellison: No, it makes what he did evil, which is quite different.

[PJ: The video interview is worth watching. He also talks about the NSA, saying what they are doing is essential. And he reveals that Steve Jobs opted at the end to stop taking his medications, because he was in so much pain, and he died within a week of stopping.] - Blair Hanley Frank, Geekwire

The disclosure also reveals that Chomsky's entire CIA file was scrubbed from Langley's archives, raising questions as to when the file was destroyed and under what authority. - John Hudson, Foreign Policy

So far, Gallup has one of the better-worded questions, finding that 53% of Americans disapprove of the NSA spying. A CBS poll also showed that a majority—at 58%—of Americans disapprove of the government "collecting phone records of ordinary Americans." And Rasmussen—though sometimes known for push polling—also recently conducted a poll showing that 59% of Americans are opposed to the current NSA spying. - EFF

How much is 1.6 percent?

The dime on the basketball court, as the NSA describes it, is still 29.21 petabytes of data a day. That means the NSA is "touching" more data than Google processes every day (a mere 20 petabytes)....Regardless how much data flows through the NSA's tap points, all of it is getting checked. While the NSA may "touch" only 29.21 petabytes of data a day, it runs its digital fingers through everything that flows through the tap points to do so. - Sean Gallagher, ars technica