(Deal is now confirmed) AT&T Is Said to Be Near a Deal to Buy DirecTV AT&T is poised to announce a takeover of DirecTV Inc. within days, people briefed on the matter said on Saturday, ushering in another sweeping transformation of the telecommunications industry. NY Times

Reminder: On PC, Games Only Look Better With Age When you start up a retro game on an old-school console, what you play will typically look antiquated. But boot up a decade-old game on a PC, and with the right mod, the game in question might look right at home with games released this year. Kotaku

Emory University server accidentally sends reformat request to all Windows PCs, including itself Have you ever reformatted a computer and then immediately realized you shouldn't have? Well, an "accident" at Emory University this week will make your mistake look like a brilliant, carefully considered decision. TNW

WhatsApp removed from Windows Phone Store, will return after fixes WhatsApp, broken on Windows Phone 8.1 and with no immediate fix promised, has vanished from the Windows Phone Store. Searches for the app on devices running both Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 turn up "We couldn't find a match. Try a different spelling or search term." WhatsApp tells us that the removal was intentional, though it should only be temporary. WP Central

Firefox risks irrelevance as mobile browsing booms The shift toward mobile has hurt Mozilla most of all: Firefox's total user share – the combination of both desktop and mobile – was 14.1% for April, its lowest level since Computerworld began tracking the metric. That was only slightly ahead of Apple's Safari and significantly behind Google's Chrome and Android browsers. Computerworld

Apple, Google End Patent Battle Apple Inc. and Google Inc. agreed to drop all lawsuits between them, setting aside one of the many issues that divide the two technology giants controlling the smartphone world. WSJ

These companies spend the most money to kill net neutrality When we arrange the top-20 net neutrality lobbying organizations by amount of reports on the issue, the disparity is clear. The five most active organizations on the issue since 2005---Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and the National Music Publishers Association---are all opposed to neutrality. Daily Dot

OS X 10.9.3, iTunes 11.2 arrive with bug fixes, feature enhancements The Mavericks update improves support for 4K displays on the new Mac Pro as well as the 15-inch Retina MacBook (Late 2013), and improves the reliability of VPN connections that use the IPSec protocol. MacWorld

Facebook working on a video chat app to take on Snapchat Facebook has been working for several months on a video-chat app, known internally as Slingshot, with a simple and speedy user interface, according to people familiar with its plans. Financial Times

Adobe Creative Cloud Crashes, Is Restored Adobe says day-long log-in snafu blocked access to cloud-based home for Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, and other creative tools. If you can't log onto a cloud-based application, is it still really there? Information Week

Don't Diss Cheap Smartphones. They're About to Change Everything I've got the new Motorola Moto E in my bag and it's just amazing. It costs just $129, unlocked, without a contract. This little Alcatel OneTouch Fierce I've got sitting on my desk is amazing, too. Heard of it? Probably not. If you're the average phone-forward WIRED reader, these may fly below your radar. Yet for several billion people worldwide, these phones and ones like them are a ticket to ride. Wired

TED founder thinks big data needs a big makeover Richard Saul Wurman isn't a fan of President Barack Obama's push for data.gov, an online repository for big data. "That's just politicians talking," the 79-year-old TED (technology, entertainment, design) conference founder told me. "I think there will be a pushback saying, 'We don't understand all this fucking data.'" The way Wurman sees it, that bulk collection of raw information has no value without a creative means of diagramming, mapping and comparing it all in a way that gives it meaning. Engadget