John Markoff / New York Times:
Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China  —  SAN FRANCISCO — A group of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers has discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.

Michael Cohen / The Official Google Blog:
Browse what the world is saying on Blog Search  —  Did you know that millions of bloggers around the world write new posts each week?  If you’re like me, you probably read only a tiny fraction of these in Google Reader.  What’s everybody else writing about?

Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Google Blogsearch Relaunches as Techmeme Killer, Across 11 Categories  —  In its first major upgrade ever, Google Blogsearch just relaunched and looks radically different.  Instead of the blank page look of Google.com, Blogsearch now looks like Google News (but uglier) - with the hottest topics …

Brent / The Official Netflix Blog:
New content to watch instantly  —  Hi, Brent here with some news about movies & TV episodes that are available to watch instantly.  Today we announced an agreement with Starz Play that adds around 1,000 choices that you can watch instantly today, and will add another 1,500 by the […]

Kelly Fiveash / The Register:
‘Windows Cloud’ to descend this month, says Ballmer  —  Microsoft prefers to ‘obsolete ourselves’  —  Microsoft will let loose a new operating system, Windows Cloud, at the company’s annual developer conference later this month.  —  Boss Steve Ballmer announced Redmond’s plans …

Tony Smith / The Register:
US consumers flock to Mac laptops  —  That sound you can hear is Steve Jobs laughing after reading figures from US market watcher NPD that Apple laptops accounted for 20 per cent of retail notebook sales during July and August.  —  That’s the key back-to-school sales period …

InfoWorld:
Ballmer: Microsoft will soon release ‘Windows Cloud’ OS  —  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed a few details on Wednesday of a forthcoming operating system that will help developers write Internet-based applications.  —  Within a month, Microsoft will unveil what Ballmer called “Windows Cloud.”

Apple Developer Connection:
To Our Developers  —  We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.  —  We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work.  It has happened before.

John Biggs / CrunchGear:
Netflix to stream movies from Starz  —  In an interesting move by Netflix and Starz, about 2,500 featured movies and concerts are now available for instant streaming over the Internet and using the Roku Netflix box.  Because Starz offers first run “premium” content, this move expands …

Craig Hockenberry / furbo.org:
[REDACTED]  —  Thank God—that’s the last time I’m going to type that word for awhile.  The meme is dead, long live the SDK.  —  As a way to celebrate the lifting of the NDA, we bring you some very special source code.  To wile away the time between our […]