The Breakfast Meeting: SEALs Punished for Video Game Work, and Samsung in the Lead

Seven members of the secretive Navy SEAL Team 6 have been punished for disclosing classified information to the makers of the video game “Medal of Honor: Warfighter,” The Associated Press reported. The violations by the SEALs - which led to punitive letters of reprimand and a partial forfeiture of pay for two months - include not seeking permission of their command to take part in the video project and showing the video designers some of their specially designed combat equipment unique to their unit.

The Obama campaign's vaunted “ground game” to get out the vote was greatly aided by mobile technology and cloud computing, Steve Lohr reports. Volunteers were guided via smartphones or tablets to a neighborhood to knock on doors, or given phone numbers to call, without ever checking into a campaign office. The campaign used mainly open-source software and Amazon's remote computing service, so it could inexpensively write and share its own programs.

• The campaign is dead, long live the campaign: Politico touts its exclusive access to a new survey from Public Policy Polling that reveals, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would start out as a dominant favorite in the 2016 Iowa caucuses if she chooses to run for president.”

For a brief moment, a smartphone other than the iPhone is the best-seller in the world, Brian X. Chen reports. According to a new report, Samsung's flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S III, surpassed in sales Apple's older iPhone 4S. The report, from Strategy Analytics, found that Samsung had shipped 18 million Galaxy S III smartphones in the third quarter, while Apple had shipped 16.2 million iPhone 4S phones in the same period. But in that time, Apple released the iPhone5, Mr. Chen writes, “so while Samsung may have dethroned a specific model of Apple's phone, the iPhone product line hasn't lost momentum.”

Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blo g. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.