News Byte

Twitter Beefs Up Site Security

Twitter on Friday announced it had implemented another layer of security measures for its users, essentially adding insurance to protect user data against any potential future compromises of Twitter’s servers. The feature, called “forward secrecy,” is also used by other Internet companies such as Mozilla, Facebook and Google.

News Byte

Google Paid Mozilla Nearly $300M Last Year (a.k.a. Almost All of Its Revenue)

Mozilla had $304.5 million in revenue from royalties in 2012, it reported yesterday in an annual release of financials (PDF), with 90 percent of the money coming from Google. We’d broken the news in late 2011 that Google had renewed its search deal with Mozilla, committing to pay almost $300 million per year. So, yup, that was right.

News Byte

Tech Firms Rally, Expecting Justice Department to Oppose Transparency Requests

Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Mozilla, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Yahoo and other tech companies today sent a letter to the heads of the U.S. Senate and House Judiciary Committees in support of proposed legislation that would allow them to publish statistics about secret national security surveillance orders. The Center for Democracy & Technology, which organized the group, said the letter was timed to coincide with the U.S. Justice Department’s filing of a brief with the FISA court today opposing many of those companies’ requests to disclose information about when it asks them for user data.

Yahoo Paid $60M to $70M for Rockmelt — Will Dump Browser and Use Tech to Better Deliver Its Media and Mobile Properties

Big money for tech that essentially failed to find customers.

Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Others Call for More NSA Transparency

The alliance includes 63 companies, investors, non-profits and trade organizations.

In New Challenge to Dropbox and Box, YouSendIt Morphs Into Hightail

Cloud since before the cloud was a thing.

Twitter Unveils Its Ad Retargeting Effort

Another social network looks to retargeting to boost revenue.

First Firefox OS Smartphone, the ZTE Open, Launches in Spain Tomorrow for $90

The Firefox OS-based ZTE Open is cheap, but is that enough?

Yieldbot Raises $5 Million More to Marry Search Buyers With Display Ads

Display ads are having a hard time. Search ads make a lot of money. So Jonathan Mendez’s pitch makes plenty of sense…

Foxconn’s Firefox OS Hiring Spree

Foxconn is looking for up to 3,000 HTML 5-savvy software engineers to help with its Firefox OS efforts.

Firefox OS? WTF? (Video)

Still No Home for Firefox on iOS