Techmeme
September 20, 2018, 10:05 AM

Top News

Chris Hall / Pocket-lint:
Echo Sub, an Alexa-powered subwoofer, leaked via Amazon.co.uk, listed at £75, coming Oct. 11, can be paired with one or two Echo devices for stereo pairing  —  Amazon is adding a subwoofer to its Echo family, bringing the bassline to its Alexa-powered speakers.
Spencer Soper / Bloomberg:
Sources: Amazon is considering a plan to open up to 3,000 Amazon Go cashierless stores by 2021  —  - Rapid expansion would rank it among biggest convenience chains  — Retailer is testing different formats for AmazonGo strategy  —  Amazon.com Inc. is considering a plan to open …
Noam Cohen / New Yorker:
Reporter says Linus Torvalds' decision to temporarily step away from Linux maintenance came after he was asked a series of questions about his conduct  —  The e-mails of the celebrated programmer Linus Torvalds land like thunderbolts from on high onto public lists, full of invective, insults, and demeaning language.
More: ZDNet and BetaNews
Suzanne Barlyn / Reuters:
John Hancock, one of the largest life insurers in the US, will now only sell policies that track fitness and health data via wearable devices and smartphones  —  (Reuters) - John Hancock, one of the oldest and largest North American life insurers, will stop underwriting traditional life insurance …
New York Times:
Inside Facebook's election “War Room”, which will be the company's hub for safeguarding elections around the world  —  MENLO PARK, Calif. — Sandwiched between Building 20 and Building 21 in the heart of Facebook's campus, an approximately 25-foot by 35-foot conference room is under construction.
BBC:
Equifax fined the maximum £500,000 by UK's Information Commissioner's Office for failing to protect the personal data of ~15M Britons in 2017 breach  —  Credit rating agency Equifax is to be fined £500,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) after it failed to protect the personal data of 15 million Britons.
Wolfie Zhao / CoinDesk:
Japan-based cryptocurrency exchange Zaif says it was hacked and ~$60M worth of cryptocurrency, including 6,000 bitcoin, were stolen from exchange's hot wallets  —  Yet another Japan-based cryptocurrency exchange has been hacked with a loss of total 6.7 billion yen, or $60 million worth of cryptocurrency, including 6,000 bitcoin.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
MariaDB announces an investment from cloud computing company ServiceNow, and that it has acquired Clustrix, a scale-out database and drop-in MySQL replacement  —  MariaDB, the company behind the eponymous MySQL drop-in replacement database, today announced that it has acquired Clusterix …
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Researcher shares flaw, reported to Western Digital in April 2017, that bypasses admin password for WD's My Cloud NAS drives; WD says fix coming in a few weeks  —  A security researcher has published details of a vulnerability in a popular cloud storage drive after the company failed to issue security patches for over a year.
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Threat researcher: hackers stole customer credit cards in a month-long data breach at online retailer Newegg, between August 14 and September 18  —  Newegg is clearing up its website after a month-long data breach.  —  Hackers injected 15 lines of card skimming code on the online retailer's payments page …
Sam Kim / Bloomberg:
Sources: Samsung is planning to curtail growth in memory chip output next year to keep supplies tight and keep prices high, amid an expected slowing in demand  —  - Biggest memory chip maker is said to prepare for slowdown  — Samsung is world's biggest maker of NAND, DRAM memory
More: Reuters
Kelly Weill / The Daily Beast:
Cody Wilson, 3D printed gun advocate, charged with a second degree felony count of sexual assault of a child  —  The far-right figure allegedly met a teen on SugarDaddyMeet.com, where he told her he was a ‘big deal.’  —  The founder of a an alt-right crowdfunding site and a 3-D gun-printing company …
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Apple Watch Series 4 review: beautiful screen, great battery life, and health-tracking features, but Siri is unreliable, and there is no always-on screen option  —  The screen steals the show  —  The greatest Apple product comeback story of the past few years has, without a doubt, been the Apple Watch.

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Earlier Picks

Jillian D'Onfro / CNBC:
Aoife White / Bloomberg:
Sarah Krouse / Wall Street Journal:
Jon Porter / The Verge: