Fast Chat: Have Tech Giants Gone to the Dark Side by Teaming Up for Beltway Lobbying?

Rolling Stone and Buzzfeed reporter Michael Hastings died early this morning in a car accident at the age of 33. Hastings’ uncompromising 2010 profile of General Stanley McChrystal led to the general being recalled to Washington by President Obama and resigning shortly thereafter. [Source: Buzzfeed / Rolling Stone]

The same day Carl Icahn proposed that Dell offer to buy back as many as 1.1 billion shares at $14 a share, Dell’s special committee struck down the proposal, saying it’s “not, in its present state, a transaction that the special committee could endorse or execute.” [Source: AllThingsD]

According to a White House statement, the US and Russia have reopened a Cold War era hotline to help prevent cyberwar. The countries will use the hotline to share information about hacking attacks. [Source: Verge]

Alternative search engines seem to be on the rise. Today, search engine DuckDuckGo tweeted that it received more than three million direct searches in a single day. [Source: Search Engine Land]

Cloudera has announced that its current CEO Mike Olson will become chief strategy officer and chairman of the board. In his place will be former Arcsight CEO Tom Reilly. [Source: GigaOm]

Toshiba has announced that it plans to cut about 10 billion yen ($104 million) in TV business costs by the end of this fiscal year. This comes after the company lost almost 50 billion yen in the last business year. [Source: Reuters]

FiftyThree, the company behind the iPad app Paper, has just closed a $15 million round of funding. This round was led by Chris Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz. [Source: VentureBeat]

Blekko has released a new iOS and Android version of its Izik search app. The Izik app makes use of Blekko’s “Dynamic Inference Graph.” [Source: TheNextWeb]

Dish today issued a response to Sprint’s lawsuit against Dish claiming its bid to buyout Clearwire is illegal. According to Dish, the lawsuit is a “transparent attempt to divert attention from its failure to deal fairly with Clearwire’s shareholders.” [Source: GigaOm]

It looks like Amazon will not be taking a cue from Netflix in terms of episode release. According to the Verge, when it released its new program “Alpha House,” it will not release every episode all at once. [Source: The Verge]

Last night the BBC announced six London-based digital media startups that will join its BBC Labs accelerator program. This is the BBC Labs’ second class. [Source: GigaOm]

GE, in a presentation today, announced it will be building new Hadoop-based appliances and software. This is to go towards GE’s new goal of connecting devices to the “industrial internet.” [Source: GigaOm]

A few months back Google added a new visualization for its Local Searches on tablets: a top results carousel bar. Today, Google introduced this feature to the desktop Local Search as well. [Source: TechCrunch]

Today Carl Icahn published a letter to Dell shareholders stating that a bank has agreed to help fund his buyout offer of the computer company. According to the letter, a major investment bank is willing to make $1.6 billion available. [Source: Reuters]

Today marks the release of 25 solar-powered charging stations at various outdoor spaces in New York City. The initiative is a joint venture between the city and AT&T. [Source: BetaBeat]

Parakweet, which offers Bookvibe, a service that recommends books based on natural language processing and social-media analytics, has raised $2 million in funding. [Source: VentureBeat]

Today web browser Torch announced it surpassed 10 million monthly active users after over 10 years on the market. It also launched its new version with a new download accelerator and music service. [Source: TechCrunch]