New York Times

A Russian crime ring has amassed the largest known collection of stolen Internet credentials, including 1.2 billion username and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses, security researchers say.

The records, discovered by Hold Security include confidential material gathered from 420,000 websites, ranging from household names to small Internet sites.

Last quarter, Xiaomi was the top smartphone seller in the largest market in the world: China. A report published by Canalys highlighted Xiaomi’s remarkable growth, surpassing giants like Samsung and Lenovo to become the top player in China.

Because of its huge growth in China, Xiaomi became the fifth largest smartphone maker in the world.

Judge Loretta Preska of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York upheld a magistrate judge’s earlier ruling that Microsoft must turn over the customer’s e-mails, held in a Microsoft data center in Ireland. Judge Preska agreed to stay her order while the company pursues an appeal.

The issue at the heart of the case is whether communications kept in data centers operated by American companies are beyond the reach of domestic search warrants. The Microsoft case is believed to be the first time that a United States company has fought against a domestic search warrant for data stored overseas.

Google says complying with Europe’s so-called right to be forgotten ruling is getting complicated.

In a lengthy response to questions from the region’s data regulators, the search giant said that it often lacked enough information to decide whether it should remove links to web pages to comply with European law.

Google said it had rejected a number of requests made by journalists, who wanted links to articles at publications where they no longer worked to be taken down.

Some members of gay and minority groups in Utah say The Salt Lake Tribune represents their concerns in culturally and ethnically changing Salt Lake City better than the competing paper, The Deseret News, which is owned by the Mormon Church.

And they say that changes made last fall in the joint operating agreement between the publications -- which include cutting The Tribune’s profits in half in exchange for cash and other benefits -- are certain to spell The Tribune’s demise.

Activists like State Senator Jim Dabakis (D-UT), a longtime gay rights advocate, are campaigning to save The Tribune -- though it remains unclear whether The Tribune needs saving.

[Commentary] Yes, phones feel slower over time as they hold more software and as our expectations of speed increase. But the spikes show that the feeling doesn’t grow gradually; it comes on suddenly in the days after a new phone is released. Yet that’s all it shows: People suddenly feel that their phone is slowing down. The data doesn’t show our iPhones actually became slower.

The important distinction is of intent. In the benign explanation, a slowdown of old phones is not a specific goal, but merely a side effect of optimizing the operating system for newer hardware. Data on search frequency would not allow us to infer intent. No matter how suggestive, this data alone doesn’t allow you to determine conclusively whether my phone is actually slower and, if so, why.

[Mullainathan is a professor of economics at Harvard]

Forecasts and studies of the impact of the Obama Administration’s incentive program for digitalization of healthcare have been varied. Some predicted big dollar savings and improved care, while others came to the opposite conclusion, seeing higher costs and medical errors induced by complex technology.

While the principle of the technology-payoff time lag is true in many industries, in health care, there is a case for special vigilance as well as for patience. The more digital patient records and decision-support software become part of diagnosis and treatment, the higher the stakes: In health information technology, there are no clinical trials or tests with randomized controls, as there are for drugs, for example.

True, digital data does not go into the body, but it can increasingly guide what does. That is why the Food and Drug Administration, in cooperation with the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Federal Communications Commission, is developing what the government calls a “risk-based regulatory framework” for digital health technology.

[Commentary] A merger between 21st Century Fox and Time Warner would reduce control of the major Hollywood studios to five owners, from six, and major television producers to four, from five.

Fox and Time Warner may no longer publish old-media newspapers or magazines, but they certainly disseminate information and opinions that may be even more vital to the “welfare of the public” today than the newspapers of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black’s era.

How many news shows and opinion panels would be produced on TV under the ownership of a Rupert Murdoch, or for that matter, any other media mogul who controlled close to 40 percent of all major film production and nearly 20 percent of all television?

To look only at price competition and economic efficiency “makes no sense whatsoever” in the media context, added with Maurice Stucke, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. He posits that any analysis of competition in media mergers should include the impact on “the marketplace of ideas,” where competition “advances truth.”

Using cat pictures -- that essential building block of the Internet -- and a supercomputer, Owen Mundy, an assistant professor of art at Florida State University, built a site that shows the locations of the cats (at least at some point in time, given their nature) and, presumably, of their owners.

His site displays random images from a sample of one million of what Mundy estimates are at least 15 million pictures tagged with the word “cat” online. The images are displayed on a map using satellite imagery, with nearby cat photos also visible. Specific street addresses are not displayed, but the geographic information can leave few details to the imagination in rural areas.

The lesson for people who share pictures online, whether it’s kittens or your children, is this: If you include more metadata than you have to with your photos, don’t be surprised if it’s used online in ways you didn’t expect and can’t fully control.

Comcast reported net income of almost $2 billion in the second quarter, with revenue growth in the company’s cable business offsetting a lackluster performance in its NBCUniversal entertainment group.

Revenue in Comcast’s cable unit increased 5.4 percent, to $11 billion. Comcast added 203,000 broadband subscribers in the quarter.