Charles Chan

When Alibaba stopped trading its shares on Friday, the Chinese e-commerce company had officially logged the biggest Initial Public Offering (IPO) in US history, raising $21.8 billion in its first day on the New York Stock Exchange. The company's earnings give it a market capitalization of over $200 billion, "putting it among the 20 biggest companies by market cap in the US," the Wall Street Journal notes.

Alibaba's IPO beat out record IPOs like Visa's $17.9 billion IPO in 2008 and General Motors' $15.8 billion sale in 2010. And Alibaba beat out its peers in the tech sector too, like Facebook (whose first-day earnings were $16 billion) and Google (whose 2004 IPO raised only $1.67 billion—paltry in today’s terms).

Earlier this month, the company announced that it would price shares at $66 per share. This morning around 12pm ET, the NYSE gave the go-ahead for the company, whose ticker symbol is BABA, to start trading. Shares started at $92.70, a third larger than what the company was aiming for, and ended the day at $93.89 after reaching a high of $99.70. In after hours trading, Alibaba is just down slightly at $93.60 per share, as of this writing.

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The US bureaucracy agreed Friday to restore a decade's worth of electronic federal court documents that were deleted last month from online viewing because of an upgrade to a computer database known as PACER.

The move by the Administrative Office of the Courts, first reported by The Washington Post, comes amid a fierce backlash from lawmakers who urged it to restore the data that is among the few methods of delivering court documents to the public. It's a paid service, costing 10 cents a page, and has long been criticized as a deeply dated system that already does too little and charges too much for online access to things like judicial orders and court briefs.

To be restored are, combined, about a decade's worth of court dockets and all manner of documents at the US Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 7th, 11th, and Federal Circuits, as well as the Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California.

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Don McCullough

The Federal Aviation Administration has blocked plans for a small drone to deliver the game football for the University of Michigan kickoff Saturday against the University of Utah before a crowd of about 110,000 fans.

The FAA's move is the latest example of flight regulators blocking the use of small drones for commercial purposes, despite the questionable legal authority for them to do so. The drone, built by Ann Arbor-based SkySpecs, was supposed to participate in a pre-game program of the American football game to celebrate the University of Michigan's 100-year anniversary of its aerospace-engineering program.

Bloomberg News said that after the FAA explained its rules, "the school backed down."

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In some ways, the modern Internet is a Wild West in terms of privacy. Internet companies collect and share heaps of data from adults, but getting the same data from kids—even a few of them, even by mistake—can land them in hot water.

This week, Yelp agreed to pay a $450,000 fine to settle charges that it violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. The FTC's complaint outlines how Yelp's mobile app allowed kids under 13 to register for the site, between 2009 and April 2013.

COPPA requires app-makers and website owners to get explicit parental permission before collecting any personal information about children under 13. That personal information can include things as simple as a name and email address. COPPA is the reason why Facebook and many other popular sites don't allow users under 13.

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The official Android Twitter app running on Mac OS. Ron Amadeo

If you remember, about a week ago, Google gave Chrome OS the ability to run Android apps through the "App Runtime for Chrome." The release came with a lot of limitations—it only worked with certain apps and only worked on Chrome OS. But a developer by the name of "Vladikoff" has slowly been stripping away these limits. First he figured out how to load any app on Chrome OS, instead of just the four that are officially supported. Now he's made an even bigger breakthrough and gotten Android apps to work on any desktop OS that Chrome runs on. You can now run Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The hack depends on App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), which is built using Native Client, a Google project that allows Chrome to run native code safely within a web browser. While ARC was only officially released as an extension on Chrome OS, Native Client extensions are meant to be cross-platform. The main barrier to entry is obtaining ARC Chrome Web Store, which flags desktop versions of Chrome as "incompatible."

Vladikoff made a custom version of ARC, called ARChon, that can be sideloaded simply by dragging the file onto Chrome. It should get Android apps up and running on any platform running the desktop version of Chrome 37 and up. The hard part is getting Android apps that are compatible with it. ARC doesn't run raw Android app packages (APKs)—they need to be converted into a Chrome extension—but Vladikoff has a tool called "chromeos-apk" that will take care of that, too.

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Here, Nobel-winning economist Eric Maskin delivers a 24/7 lecture, in which he explains his research in 24 seconds, then in seven words. Improbable Research

The 24th Ig Nobel prizes were awarded last night, recognizing scientific research that “first makes people laugh and then makes them think."

The traditionally elaborate ceremony's entertainment included the Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest, two Paper Airplane Deluges, and an opera set to the music of Mozart and called What's Eating You, "about people who stop eating food and instead nourish themselves exclusively with pills."

The awards for individual categories were presented at Harvard University by "a group of genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel Laureates." All but one of the teams managed to get representatives to Boston to receive the awards in person (and the group that couldn't make it appeared by video).

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Aurich vs The Whitehouse, DWI

Proposed legislation unveiled Thursday seeks to undermine the Obama administration's position that any company with operations in the United States must comply with valid warrants for data, even when that data is stored on overseas servers.

The bipartisan Law Enforcement Access to Data Stored Abroad Act (LEADS Act) [PDF] comes in response to a federal judge's July decision ordering Microsoft to turn over e-mails stored on its Irish servers as part of a Department of Justice drug investigation. The Department of Justice argued that global jurisdiction is necessary in an age when "electronic communications are used extensively by criminals of all types in the United States and abroad, from fraudsters to hackers to drug dealers, in furtherance of violations of US law." New York US District Judge Loretta Preska agreed, ruling that "it is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information." The decision is stayed pending appeal.

Microsoft, along with a slew of other companies, maintains that the Obama administration's position in the case puts US tech companies into conflict with foreign data protection laws. And it fears that if the court decision stands, foreigners could lose more confidence in US companies' cloud and tech offerings, especially in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations.

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bfishadow/ Flickr

Customers, consumer advocacy groups, and small cable companies are speaking out against AT&T’s proposed purchase of DirecTV.

But just as Comcast was able to claim broad support for its Time Warner Cable merger, AT&T has plenty of moneyed interests and politicians on its side. Microsoft wrote to the Federal Communications Commission this week in support of the merger, pointing to AT&T’s promises to expand broadband deployments if it’s allowed to buy the satellite TV company.

Microsoft, which partners with AT&T to offer technology services to businesses, echoed AT&T’s talking points in its letter:

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The iPhone 6 Plus, exploded. iFixit

When you want to know more about the stuff inside your phone without actually taking it apart, you can count on iFixit to make the sacrifice for you. Late last night, the site began (and eventually completed) its teardowns of the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, revealing slightly more detailed information about the insides of both devices, as well as how difficult to repair they'll be if you happen to break them.

Like the iPhone 5 and 5S, the first step toward dismantling an iPhone 6 is to remove a pair of Pentalobe screws flanking the Lightning port, then lifting up the screen with a suction cup. The TouchID button on the 5S relied on a cable routed between the display and the bottom of the phone, and would-be repairers had to be careful not to sever this while taking the phone apart. Both iPhone 6 models integrate this cable into the display assembly, removing one more potential point of failure.

Once opened, both phones prove to be substantially similar—the 6 Plus has a larger 2915mAh battery, while the 6 has an 1810mAh version, but this is the chief difference. Both phones include a Qualcomm MDM9625M LTE modem and WTR1625L transceiver, which collectively provide faster 150Mbps LTE speeds and wider support for different LTE bands (an additional WFR1620 chip provides carrier aggregation). The Apple A8 SoC is (still) paired with 1GB of RAM. The expected NFC, Wi-Fi, and M8 motion coprocessor, along with other power management and touch controller chips, are all present and accounted for.

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The overall winner, this photo of the aurora was taken in Iceland, land of the unpronounceable geography. In this case, you're looking at the Jökulsarlon lagoon, located in Vatnajökull National Park. © James Woodend/Royal Observatory, Greenwich

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Each year, the UK's Royal Observatory in Greenwich runs an Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest. Yesterday, the Observatory announced the winners of its 2013 version, the winners of which will be on display, making it worth a visit if you're anywhere near London. We've brought you some of the winners of microscopy contests in the past; this gives us the chance to feature things at the opposite end of the scale, from planets to galaxies.

Just like the microscopy images, all of them can tell us something about the natural world. Details of images can reveal information about topics that run from orbital mechanics to the behavior of supernovae. But they're a great reminder that something can be both informative and stunningly beautiful. For many people, it was the beauty of the natural world that first inspired them to ask questions about it and set them off on the road that led to a career in science.

Entries are being accepted for the 2014 contest up until late February this year, so if you've got a scope and something compelling, get to work!

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A patent troll called Lumen View Technology got stopped in its tracks last year after it sued Santa Barbara-based startup FindTheBest, then asked the company for a quick $50,000 settlement. It lost its case, and has now said it won't even bother appealing.

Instead of settling to avoid a costly lawsuit, as several other small companies had, FindTheBest responded with a pledge to fight the patent all the way and also slapped Lumen View with a civil RICO lawsuit.

The counter-attack caused Lumen View's patent to be dismantled in short order, when the judge in the case ruled that it was nothing more than a computerized twist on an ancient idea. The patent delineated a process of having parties input preference data, and then an automated process of determining a good match. "Matchmakers have been doing this for millennia," wrote US District Judge Denise Cote in her order invalidating the patent.

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Kelly Schindler/US Navy

This morning, a giant Navy surveillance drone landed at Patuxent River base in Maryland after flying over the Gulf of Mexico and the American Southwest from an airfield owned by Northrup Grumman in Palmdale, California. The test flight represented the first cross-country flight for the MQ-4C Triton drone after 15 previous test flights.

The drone flew 3,290 nautical miles over 11 hours, a Navy press release said. “Operators navigated the aircraft up the Atlantic Coast and Chesapeake Bay at altitudes in excess of 50,000 feet to ensure there were no conflicts with civilian air traffic,” the release noted.

The drone is just the first piece in what the Navy calls Broad Area Maritime Surveillance, or BAMS. The MQ-4C Triton will be used to keep tabs on a wide area using “radar, infrared sensors and advanced cameras to provide full-motion video and photographs to the military,” according to The Washington Post. Eventually, a network of these drones could be deployed to fly around the world and provide 24-hour, 7-day-a-week coverage of a given area.

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The cybercriminals that compromised Home Depot's network and installed malware on the home-supply company's point-of-sale systems likely stole information on 56 million payment cards, the company stated on Thursday.

In the first details revealed in its investigation of the breach, the company said the malicious software that compromised those payment systems had been custom-built to avoid triggering security software. The breach included stores in the United States and Canada and appears to have compromised transactions that occurred between April and September 2014.

"To protect customer data until the malware was eliminated, any terminals identified with malware were taken out of service, and the company quickly put in place other security enhancements," Home Depot said in its statement. "The hacker's method of entry has been closed off, the malware has been eliminated from the company's systems, and the company has rolled out enhanced encryption of payment data to all US stores."

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While many jurisdictions have tried (and failed) to put legal barriers in place to prevent children from buying or playing violent video games, Calfornia's Marin County is taking a different tack, asking families to voluntarily trade in their violent video games for ice cream and raffle tickets.

The Marin Independent Journal has a report on the county's efforts for Domestic Violence Awareness Month, which include weekly opportunities to trade in violent video games or toy guns. Participants will be provided with ice cream from the local Ben & Jerry's affiliate, according to the report, and parents of those participating will be entered in a raffle for further prizes.

The toy and game drive is being spearheaded by District Attorney Ed Berberian and the Center for Domestic Peace, who teamed up to host a firearm buyback program that took in over 850 weapons two years ago. Why move from collecting real guns to collecting fake guns and games that feature fake guns?

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Google's cutesy video on law enforcement requests.

The Washington Post is reporting that Google will finally step up security efforts on Android and enable device encryption by default. The Post has quoted company spokeswoman Niki Christoff as saying “As part of our next Android release, encryption will be enabled by default out of the box, so you won't even have to think about turning it on.”

That "next Android release" should be Android L, which is currently out as a developer preview and is expected to be released before the end of the year.

The move should bring Android up to parity with iOS. Apple recently announced enhanced encryption for iOS 8, which Apple says makes it impossible for the company to decrypt a device, even for law enforcement. While Android's encryption was optional, it seems to work in a similar way, with Christoff saying "For over three years Android has offered encryption, and keys are not stored off of the device, so they cannot be shared with law enforcement."

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US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, Pasadena courthouse. --Mark--

In general, websites aren't responsible for the things their users do or post. That's because of a landmark federal Internet law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The law allows sites like Yelp, Craigslist, and YouTube to host loads of user-produced content, while directing most lawsuits over that content toward the users, not the websites.

However, an appeals court ruling yesterday may join the small batch of precedents that set out the murky limits of CDA Section 230. A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has allowed (PDF) an alleged rape victim to sue ModelMayhem.com, a site she says was used by her attackers.

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"I am what I am, and I look like me, not everyone else."

On Tuesday, Norwegian news site VG reported that a 16-year-old boy found his newest Facebook profile photo deleted automatically by the site, but not for containing offensive content or misrepresenting himself. Embret Henock Haldammen, a high school student in Kristiansand, Norway, had posted his latest school portrait weeks earlier, only to receive a notice stating that "the profile picture violated Facebook's policies."

Without receiving a response clarifying what those policies were, Haldammen came to the conclusion that the image was deleted because of his face's lymphatic malformations, which he's had since birth.

"We're used to people pointing, looking, and laughing at him," Haldammen's father said to Norwegian news site Fædrelandsvennen (translated by Google). "But that Facebook acts as a youth, and not a company, is appalling." The reports also include a photo of Haldammen posing with a former Norwegian Prime Minister, which he had used as a profile photo in the past with no incident.

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The Barbours. Fox8 WGHP Two newlyweds were each handed a life sentence Thursday for luring a stranger to his death via a Craigslist advertisement.

The Pennsylvania federal judge who sentenced Miranda Barbour, 19, and Elytte Barbour, 22, said the sentence, which prohibits parole, was necessary for their "permanent removal" from society.

The pair killed Troy LaFerrara, 42, of Central Pennsylvania in a scene local media described as right out of a horror movie.

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Microsoft has made its next set of layoffs, continuing the downsizing announced in July. Some 2,100 jobs have been cut worldwide, with 747 of those in the company's home state of Washington.

CEO Satya Nadella plans to shrink the company by about 18,000 people overall, with 12,500 of these coming from the 25,000 staff that came with the newly acquired Nokia handset business. In the first round of cuts in July, 13,000 jobs were lost. With today's cuts, that leaves another 2,900 positions that Microsoft wants to eliminate.

One victim is Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley lab, reports Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet. The lab, which focused on distributed computing and large-scale systems, will be closing on Friday. Microsoft has said that some researchers will be offered positions at other labs.

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New York, one of the RGGI states, has nearly two Gigawatts of installed wind capacity. NY Department of Environmental Conservation

Economists and policymakers frequently talk about the "social cost of carbon"—the price that society as a whole pays for disruptions caused by climate change and ocean acidification. Although there are various ways of calculating it that give different results, the US currently estimates the cost at $37 a ton. At least nationally, however, there have been no attempts to get anyone to actually pay this price for their emissions.

But locally, a number of states are trying. Most of the Northeast has banded together to form the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI. This is a cap-and-trade system, where emissions allowances are auctioned by the group. Unfortunately, plans for the auctions were made prior to the boom in fracking, which has dramatically lowered the emissions of electricity generation in the US. As a result, RGGI emissions allowances have been auctioned off at the legal minimum, just under $2 a ton—well below just about any estimate of the social cost of carbon.

As a result, the group decided to take two actions. To begin with, it reduced its total cap on CO2 emissions by 45 percent. Then, it reduced the number of allowances auctioned off. It does so by holding back a pool of allowances until the auction price reaches a preset value. Currently, that value is $4/ton. As a result, three consecutive auctions have resulted in prices above $4. The reserve price is set to rise by $2 every year until it hits $10, then rise by 2.5 percent each following year.

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