Kim Zetter / Threat Level:
TSA Withdraws Subpoenas Against Bloggers  —  TSA Special Agent John Enright, left, speaks to Steven Frischling outside the blogger  —  In the wake of public outcry against the Transportation Security Administration for serving civil subpoenas on two bloggers, the government agency has canceled …

Brad Stone / Bits:
Whoops!  F.C.C. Chairman Spams Facebook Friends  —  Facebook scam artists have closed out 2009 by snagging a prominent victim: Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.  —  On Friday morning at around 10:30 a.m., Mr. Genachowski sent his Facebook friends this puzzling message …

Seth Weintraub / 9 to 5 Mac:
This is why Apple denied Google Latitude from the App Store…  Another Apple patent today looks remarkably similar to the functionality of Google Latitude which Apple relegated to WebApp status earlier this year.  Obviously if Apple is working on their own version of Google Latitude …

Tim Culpan / Bloomberg:
Apple Expects to Ship 10 Million Tablets in First Year, Lee Kai-Fu Says  —  Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) — Apple Inc. expects to ship 10 million tablet computers in the device’s first year of release, former Google Inc. Greater China president Lee Kai-fu wrote on his Web log, citing a friend familiar […]

Jeff Bertolucci / PC World:
Google: Never Mind the Nexus One, How About a Cheaper Cell Plan?  —  Based on this week’s flurry of media reports, it appears that Google will introduce its Nexus One smartphone right after the New Year.  This HTC-built handset sounds like a very good Android phone, a solid effort … […]

Ignore all the other lists! As we did last year, Techmeme has distilled its very own Top 10 story list, utilizing headline ranking data archived throughout the year. While we employ a terrific team of news editors to guide our story selection, this list draws on many factors outside our direct influence, making […]

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
ChaCha Makes Its Crazy Business Model…Profitable  —  We’ve always had a lot of fun with Indianapolis-based startup ChaCha.  They launched in 2007 as a human powered search engine - meaning a human found you answers when you typed in a query.  Pranksters, obviously, loved it.

XLeung / Cloned In China:
Kaifu Lee said Apple Tablet looked like a bigger iPhone  —  Kaifu Lee, the Ex president of Google China , who also ever worked for Apple, revealed some information about the Apple tablet today through a Twitter alike microblog launched by Chinese news portal Sina.com.cn and his account on this […]

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
The Tablet … —”Just a Touch Away, the Elusive Tablet PC”, The New York Times, 4 October 2009  —  Here’s the thimbleful of information I have heard regarding The Tablet (none of which has changed in six months): The Tablet project is real, it has you-know-who’s considerable undivided attention … […]

The Real McCrea:
Silicon Valley: Top 10 of the 2000s  —  It’s all too easy to view the first decade of the 21st Century as just an unmitigated series of disasters: September 11th, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and the meltdown of the global financial system, to name just a few.