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The Internet desperately wants the White House to do two things: pardon whistleblower Edward Snowden and to deport man-boy pop icon, Justin Bieber. Today,  a petition to deport the Biebs on the White House’s citizen portal passed the magic 100,000-signature threshold to require an official response. The monumental civic victory provided the procrastinating masses a fleeting moment of entertainment at the digital water cooler this morning (and a hearty chuckle from this reporter). Honestly, I just love the Internet sometimes. “We the people of the United States feel that we are being wrongly represented in the world of pop culture. We would like to see the dangerous, reckless, destructive, and drug abusing, Justin Bieber deported and his green card revoked,”  wrote  the petitioners.

In the  first earnings call  since Evan Spiegel  rejected Zuck’s $3 billion offer to buy Snapchat , the Facebook CEO sent a very clear signal to competitors. “Our vision is to create a set of products that let our users share with any audience they want,” said Zuck. “Not everyone wants to share with all of their friends at once. A lot of the new growth we see is from giving people power to share with different, separate groups of people.” Three products, in particular, help Facebook fight off Snapchat: Messenger, Instagram, and Groups. Zuckerberg announced that Facebook Messenger, which was revamped in November to be much faster, has grown by 70 percent in the past three months. Meanwhile, Facebook Groups have grown to 500 million users, with Zuck calling them a “core product.” And then there’s Instagram, Facebook’s golden ticket. The photo-sharing service  introduced Instagram Direct  in December to give photo-sharers control of the audience for any p...

Heroku , the cloud platform Salesforce acquired in 2010, today  launched  a new class of dyno that has 12 times the RAM and 40 times the CPU power of a regular dyno. In Heroku’s world,  dynos  are the containers your applications run in, with the most basic ones costing 5 cents per hour. The new performance dynos, which are part of the Heroku XL family that the company is launching with this release, run on machines that are highly isolated from the rest of the Heroku infrastructure. While regular dynos run on a multi-tenant infrastructure, performance dynos do not share their CPUs with other applications. This, the company argues, allows for a “high and consistent quality of service” that allows apps to run faster and with better  response times . Heroku argues that some of the largest app on its platform now often exceeds 10,000 requests per second; both  Urban Dictionary  and headline factory  Upworthy  run on the platform. In total,...

In January,  Windows 8.1 scooted past Vista’s market share , taking the fourth-place slot behind 7, XP, and 8. In the month, Windows 8.1 picked up moderate market share, and Windows 8 eased as expected, meaning that Microsoft’s new platform is seeing slow total growth. In fact, Windows 8.x — both Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 — gained a mere 0.09 percent market share in the quarter. Looking more broadly, Windows 7 sat essentially flat, and Windows XP lost more than a half percent. Vista continued its descent into irrelevancy. The  fine folks over at The Register  were kind enough to graph the data:

All the big tech companies are opening up a bit more about requests made by the U.S. National Security Agency, with  Google ,  Microsoft ,  Facebook ,  Yahoo  and  LinkedIn  detailing new info included in their respective transparency reports today. The new reports now include how many requests for the data of its members it has received from the government, how many total users were affected, and what percentage of those receive a response from the company. Apple  released similar data last week  alongside its earning call, and there’s a reason for the timing that’s non-coincidental: A change to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act just put into effect now allows the companies to share more specifics around what kind of information they’re sharing and being asked to share by the government. The  increased transparency was put into effect last week , in a ruling addressed to the legal counsel of all those companies listed above....

Early this month,  Microsoft declared that  ”government snooping potentially now constitutes an ‘advanced persistent threat,’” a statement that became ironic this weekend, given that, early this month, Microsoft likened government surveillance to “sophisticated malware and cyber attacks.” New NSA revelations out this weekend detailed precisely how the NSA’s methods lean on malware and employ cyber attacks in their “snooping,” to use Microsoft’s term. Thus, the NSA’s surveillance efforts are not a  potential  advanced persistent threat, as Microsoft first published.

BlackBerry continues to tighten its purse strings, and even top executives and global recording stars aren’t safe – and if you’re both, you’re screwed. Alicia Keys will depart her role as “global creative director” for the smartphone, software and services provider as of January 30th,  CTV News reports . New CEO (who has dropped the “interim” from his title)  John Chen has been cleaning house at BlackBerry  since taking the reins, likely getting rid of executives who were too aligned with the vision of Thorsten Heins and his predecessors. Keys was a noteworthy Heins hire, and as such was probably too close to the throne to escape with her job intact. It might also just be that Chen and the company’s new management realize that a thinly veiled PR arrangement with a celebrity whose fame arguably peaked a while ago isn’t the best use of company resources. Keys has obviously been little more than a highly paid spokesperson for the company, despite the seemingly meaty ti...