John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Regarding the Brouhaha Over the Version of Flash in Snow Leopard  —  There’ve been a bunch of stories this week (see: here, here, here, etc.) making hay over the fact that the version of Flash that ships with Snow Leopard is not the very latest, because the very latest version, […]

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Confirmed: Foursquare Gets $1.35 Million To Play With From Union Square And O’Reilly AlphaTech  —  As we alluded to two days ago, the location-based social network Foursquare has just raised its first round of funding.  PaidContent found out about the seed round through an SEC document, and we’ve confirmed the round […]

Marianne Schultz / MacRumors iPhone Blog:
TomTom Car Kit Release Pushed Back to October  —  TomTom’s FAQ for its iPhone navigation app now notes that the anxiously-awaited Car Kit will not be released until October: … This update to the FAQ comes surprisingly close to the kit’s run through the FCC for approval just last […]

Kelly Hodgkins / Boy Genius Report:
Verizon Wireless Touch Pro2 to land September 11th, $199.99  —  As if an Android handset and a couple of Blackberry handsets weren’t enough, Verizon Wireless customers may have yet another handset coming quickly down the pike.  A trusted ninja let us know that VZW’s Touch Pro2 is slated … […]

Bloomberg:
Dish Told to Pay TiVo Almost $200 Million Over Patent  —  Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) — Dish Network Corp. and EchoStar Corp. were told to pay almost $200 million to TiVo Inc. for contempt of an order that it stop providing its DVR service after losing a patent-infringement ruling.

Mathew D / The Global Outpost:
China’s Potential Crackdown on Music Piracy  —  China’s Ministry of Culture has issued a new online music policy that will regulate online music content and potentially reduce the level of music piracy.  —  Pali Research has already warned that this policy will significantly affect search engine Baidu …

Rafat Ali / paidContent:
Social App Foursquare Takes in $1.35 Million in Funding From Unionsquare  —  Foursquare, the hot iPhone social app that allows you to broadcast your location to your friends, is raising its seed round of $1.35 million., and has raised almost all of it, according to a new SEC document just filed.

Siobhan Gorman / Wall Street Journal:
How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade  —  PALO ALTO, Calif. — From a Silicon Valley office strewn with bean-bag chairs, a group of twenty-something software engineers is building an unlikely following of terrorist hunters at U.S. spy agencies.  —  One of the latest entrants …

Fred / A VC:
RSS Is Alive And Well  —  Somehow the comments on my “10 Characteristics of Great Companies” post yesterday drifted into the topic of the future of RSS.  I was debating whether to wade into this silly debate about whether “RSS is dead” or not and was leaning toward ignoring it.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Brainstorm Tech:
Meet Seth the blogger guy, AT&T’s answer to angry iPhone owners  —  Seth Bloom.  Photo: AT&T  —  “We have heard you.  We are on it.”  —  So says the Seth Bloom — a.k.a. Seth the blogger guy — the geeky talking head that AT&T (T) has sent out to do […]