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Techmeme
August 8, 2017, 1:10 PM

Top News

Bloomberg:
Anti-diversity memo author James Damore confirms Google has fired him; Pichai tells employees that portions of his memo violated the company's Code of Conduct  —  Engineer wrote memo blasting “politically correct monoculture”  —  CEO Pichai said Google employee violated Code of Conduct
Taylor Soper / GeekWire:
Spotify comes to Xbox One, as Microsoft rolls out new Xbox homepage with Fluent Design, allowing users more customization  —  Xbox Live is getting a new look.  —  Microsoft is rolling out a redesigned homepage for Xbox Live that gives users more control over what they see.
Greg Bensinger / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Uber plans to close or sell most of its US car-leasing division to stem unsustainably high losses, just two years after starting the business  —  Move by the ride-hailing company is due to unsustainably high losses  —  Uber Technologies Inc. plans to wind down its U.S. subprime car-leasing division …
Samuel Gibbs / The Guardian:
HBO hackers demand a multimillion-dollar ransom and release emails, scripts, and personal phone numbers of GoT stars in latest dump of stolen data  —  Group tells company CEO to pay multimillion-dollar ransom or else risk 1.5TB of shows and confidential corporate data being released online
Jon Russell / TechCrunch:
Didi Chuxing makes an undisclosed investment in Middle Eastern ride-hailing service Careem, which operates in 80 cities across 13 countries  —  A week after its first investment in Europe, Chinese ride-sharing giant Didi Chuxing is spreading its wings once again after it announced a financing deal …
BuzzFeed:
Study of 450+ websites, associated Facebook pages, and their owners reveals inner workings of partisan pages: FB is kingmaker, right-wing's more prolific, more  —  How ideologues, opportunists, growth hackers, and internet marketers built a massive new universe of partisan news on the web and on Facebook.
Samson Mow / Fortune:
Bitcoin Cash is an untested Bitcoin fork that is putting undue pressure on Bitcoin exchanges and wallet providers to support the currency  —  The newly created Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a rushed spinoff of Bitcoin (BTC), a clonecoin of which there have been many in Bitcoin's past.
Tweets: @mdudas
Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:
Israeli lidar tech startup Oryx Vision raises $50M Series B led by Third Point Ventures and WRV  —  Israeli startup Oryx Vision has raised a $50 million Series B round led by Third Point Ventures and WRV to help continue to develop and commercialize its innovative LiDAR tech …
Barb Darrow / Fortune:
IBM touts improvement in scaling deep learning performance across servers, says its tech reached 95% efficiency across 64 servers housing 256 processors  —  The race to make computers smarter and more human-like continued this week with IBM IBM claiming it has developed technology …
GSMArena.com:
Picture of alleged Google Pixel 2 developer unit leaks, shows front stereo speakers and the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack  —  A tipster sent us a photo of what's allegedly the Google Pixel 2.  It's clearly an early dev unit with all those stickers on the back.

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Earlier Picks

Johana Bhuiyan / Recode:
Bloomberg:
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat: