Zynga

In late 2010, the social gaming company Zynga was on a buying spree. Riding high on the success of FarmVille, the San Francisco-based startup was snatching up smaller rivals across the country, including Dallas' Bonfire Studios some three months after the firm released the not-at-all derivative We Farm.

But there's only so much digital farming Facebook users can do before it starts to seem like actual labor, and Zynga's fortunes have steadily faded over the past year and a half. After a much-ballyhooed initial public offering, the company's stock price peaked in March 2012 and then, starting with Facebook's IPO two months later, took a nosedive. The price has been hovering at about $3 per share for months, about a quarter of its 2012 peak.

Zynga responded today by slashing 520 jobs, reducing staff costs by $80 million, and closing offices in New York, L.A. and Dallas. All Things D explains the move in more detail:

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Barrett Brown's had a rough few months, each one a little worse than the last.

In September, he was raided, arrested and ultimately charged with threatening an FBI agent on YouTube and Twitter. In December the feds threw some more charges at him, this time for sharing a link related to the hack of security firm Stratfor. In January, they added a few more, for concealing evidence. Then they charged his mom with obstructing the execution of a search warrant, an offense for which she faces up to 12 months in prison and a fine of $100,000.

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Via.

There's still some debate over whether the return of manufacturing to the U.S. -- "reshoring," it's called -- is a lasting trend or just a bump on the road toward an entirely knowledge-based economy. Some experts suggest it's merely a byproduct of the recession. But there's no doubt that it's happening. Ford, Caterpiller, GE and Apple have all made high-profile decision to bring some manufacturing operations back from overseas.

None of those moves involved smartphones, every single one of which is assembled in another country. But this week, Motorola Mobility announced it will be assembling its new Moto X phone at a new manufacturing plant in Fort Worth.

The company explains its thought process:

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rounds.com

William Youkers was on parole in 2011 when he choked his pregnant girlfriend in Plano. He pleaded guilty, and the judge was lenient, placing him in a community supervision program. But three months later, he tested positive for meth. He assured Judge Scott Becker that he was turning his life around by taking community college classes and moving in with his mother. Becker wasn't convinced, though, and sentenced him to eight years in prison.

When his request for a new trial was denied, Youkers took his plea to the appeals court. There, he stepped onto ground that hasn't yet been tread in Texas courts: the judge's Facebook status.

Youkers discovered at some point after his trial that Becker was Facebook friends with the father of his pregnant girlfriend and had been throughout the trial. What's more, the father had sent Becker a Facebook message intended to sway the judge's decision in the case. At the very least, Youkers argues, this raises big questions about the judge's impartiality.

See also
Texas Lawyers May Soon Be Able to Serve Defendent Via Facebook

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The media has had a hard time labeling Barrett Brown. "Anonymous spokesman" doesn't fit because Anonymous is too anarchic and loosely organized to have a spokesman. For the same reason, he's not the collective's "self-proclaimed" spokesman, though he did have more than his share of media appearances. The best option seems to be simply to call Brown a "hacktivist" -- this conveys the idea that he agitates for a cause (Internet freedom) and that he uses quasi-legal means to do so -- and move on.

But now that Brown faces a century in prison on a raft of federal criminal charges, his supporters have settled on a different term to describe Brown: journalist.

Brown's legal defense fund dispatched a press release yesterday calling his arrest and prosecution "a prime example of government persecution of journalists who challenge the status quo."

Brown, his supporters say, was being targeted for his work with ProjectPM, the crowd-sourced research effort he helped establish to comb through leaked documents about government security and intelligence contractors. He was also working on a book for Amazon tentatively called Anonymous: Tales From Inside The Accidental Cyberwar.

See also:
Three Weeks After FBI Raid, Feds Indict Barrett Brown
Is Barrett Brown the Threatening One, or Is it the Guys Who Locked Him Up?

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When Cody Wilson, a libertarian-minded University of Texas law student, first announced plans to fabricate a gun using a 3-D printer in hopes of radically democratizing access to firearms, it seemed a bit like tilting at windmills, especially after the printer he was using was seized.

But Wilson forged ahead, getting help from a San Antonio defense firm, freaking out the New York Times and eventually creating The Cuomo, a 30-round AR-15 magazine.

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Coming soon to Dallas. Possibly.

The Wire, David Simon's epic examination of power, corruption and narcotics in a major American city, was not set in Texas. It couldn't have been. Not because cities here don't have those things (they do) but because local police departments aren't allowed to go around wiretapping drug dealers.

Under current law, that responsibility falls to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Whenever a judge approves a wiretap, prosecutors have to go through DPS to set it up. But this rarely happens. State district judges (the feds have their own system) ordered only two wiretaps in 2011. The previous year the number was one. The year before that, zero.

Nevertheless, twin measures would let Harris County and the state's six largest police departments perform their own wiretaps are sailing through the Legislature. The Senate approved its bill last month, and the issue got a favorable hearing this week in the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee.

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On Monday afternoon, two homeowners in the Lower Greenville West Neighborhood Association grew alarmed when they spotted a team of a half dozen or so guys who were snapping pictures and trespassing on private property. The homeowners were suspicious and called 911. Later, they sent out an email blast to neighbors, urging them to keep an eye out for the men.

They claimed to be from Google, produced one tattered business card that did not reach a business line, and claimed they were on public property. In fact, we caught them redhanded in [a resident's] back yard, inside the fence ... all over his yard. We kept them there asking questions and getting information in order to allow the DPD element time to arrive. By this time, two of them had gotten nervous and bolted.

They told the DPD officers a somewhat different story after the officers arrived.

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IP Nav doesn't say what patents Neiman Marcus is allegedly infringing on, but our money's on the driveable cupcakes.

In the decade since it was founded in Dallas, IP Nav has established itself as a global leader in the increasingly lucrative business of "patent assertion," offering clients the ability to "maximize the value of their IP assets." Put more bluntly, it's a patent troll, shaking down companies by threatening them with lawsuits over patents that they or their clients are squatting on. They are a big problem in the tech world, and IP Nav is a big part of it. Rackspace, the San Antonio-based cloud computing firm, recently called the company "one of the most notorious patent trolls in America."

So when Neiman Marcus received a communique from IP Nav in April, the retailer knew the score. Headlined "proposal to negotiate patent license," the letter explains that an analysis reveals that some Neiman Marcus products appear to use patents held by an anonymous client, described only as the owner of "valuable patents in the field of automation of application programs.

"We would very much welcome the opportunity to enter into constructive discussions with your company to determine whether we can agree to a mutually acceptable patent license agreement or that you are not using our client's patents," the letter continues. "We are focused on addressing these issues without the need for costly and protracted litigation."

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Arlington PD, aviating.

Last year, the Arlington Police Department bought a pair of teeny tiny adorable drones, which the FAA gave them the go-ahead to fly back in March. The APD was stoked, dubbing their new toys their "Aviation Unit" and issuing an FAQ about how the drones would never be used for "routine patrols and surveillance" or to pursue suspects. (Although a toy helicopter hovering above your head as you ran from the cops would have a certain level of menace. A very low level, but still.) Instead, the APD said, the drones would be used for things like "clearing major traffic accidents more quickly," assessing the damage from natural disasters, and taking photos of complex crime scenes.

But as the Texas Tribune's Emily Ramshaw reports today, this puts the APD on a potential collision course with state Representative Lance Gooden, who filed a bill this session to prevent drones from surveilling stuff indiscriminately. (The bill was co-authored by Arlington's own Bill Zedler, in a rare display of non-crazy.)

The Arlington Police are pretty sure they shouldn't be subject to that law, though, should it become a law.

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