Every day, the Fortune staff spends hours poring over tech stories, posts, and reviews from all over the Web to keep tabs on the companies that matter. We’ve assembled the day’s most newsworthy bits below.
“I never thought I was a very good manager. I mean I am decent, but I want to go back to what I am good at, which is looking for opportunities to grow the business. Greg [Blatt] is a better manager than I am.” — outgoing IAC/Interactive CEO Barry Diller (Fortune)
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Photo: Scott J. Ferrell/Getty Images Senator Joe Lieberman introduced anti-WikiLeaks legislation that would make it a federal crime to publish the identity of a U.S. intelligence source. “This legislation will help hold people criminally accountable who endanger these sources of information that are vital to protecting our national security interests,” said Lieberman in a statement. (Wired)
- The hits to WikiLeak just keep on coming. EveryDNS.net ceased its DNS services to the wikileaks.org domain late last night citing those recent distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, which “threaten the stability of the EveryDSN.net infrastructure.” DNS is the protocol used to translate Internet names — in this case, wikileaks.org — to their numeric IP addresses. (Skeptic Geek)
- Amazon says the reason it dropped WikiLeaks from Amazon Web Services wasn’t because of the government brouhaha but because the controversial whistleblower web site wasn’t following its terms of service. (paidContent)
- And in case you were wondering just where WikiLeaks stores its controversial treasure trove of state secrets these days, the site now uses a cave-like Cold War bunker inside White Mountain, near Stockholm, Sweden. (CNN)
- It’s official: LivingSocial secured $175 million in funding from Amazon, as well an $8 million investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners.
- Looking for another reason why Google is so willing to spend upwards of $5 billion for Groupon? According to online analyst firm Hitwise, Groupon commands 79% of U.S. visits to the group-buying category, versus LivingSocial with 8%. (TechCrunch)
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111 8th Avenue in New York City Google spent $1.9 billion for the 18-story, block-wide 111 8th Avenue building in Chelsea, New York. It’s apparently the third-largest building in Manhattan. (Fortune)
- eBay bought Milo.com, a shopping search engine that shows what’s locally available in-store, for $75 million. (Silicon Alley Insider)
- Microsoft unveiled an update to its propietary web platform, Silverlight, with Silverlight 5, which should improve current features like media playback, add 3-D and hardware acceleration, and cut down on development time. (cnet)
- Take it as a testament to the network’s speed or simply a bad sign of things to come, but Verizon Wireless customers could theoretically burn through their 5 GB data cap for the company’s upcoming 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) service in 32 minutes. (PC Mag)
- 10gen, which develops and supports the open-source, doc-oriented MongoDB database, raised $6.5 million during its third-round of funding. Investors include Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures. (GigaOm)
- Google Chrome nearly doubled its market share this year, from 5.22% back in January to 9.26% last month. Not too shabby. (Fortune)
- Online investing startup Betterment closed $3 million during its first round of funding, led by Bessember Venture Partners.
- Despite the Chinese smartphone market growing 200% year over year, Apple sold less than 500,000 iPhones last quarter, a “somewhat disappointing” figure for Morgan Keegan’s Travis McCourt. (Fortune)
