Techmeme
October 31, 2018, 3:50 PM

Top News

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Google introduces “Emoji Minis” in Gboard for Android and iOS, which uses machine learning to create customizable emoji-sized stickers based on users' selfies  —  Last summer, Google introduced its own take on Bitmoji with the launch of “Mini” stickers in its keyboard app, Gboard …
Business Insider:
Sources: Apple held multiple acquisition talks with Leap Motion, beginning in 2013 and most recently in spring 2018, when Apple made an offer between $30M-$50M  —  - Apple has offered to buy augmented reality startup Leap Motion multiple times, most recently in the spring of 2018.
James Vincent / The Verge:
iRobot partners with Google and will share spatial data from Roombas to help improve Google's smart home experience by mapping rooms  —  The two companies are working together to leverage spatial data generated by iRobot's robovacs  —  Google and iRobot have announced they're working together …
Peter Cao / 9to5Mac:
Apple has pulled watchOS 5.1 update after reports that it had bricked some Apple Watches  —  [Update: Apple has now pulled watchOS 5.1.  Users who haven't updated should refrain from doing so if it was downloaded, but not yet installed.]  —  While many users are disappointed with the lack …
Virginia Hughes / BuzzFeed News:
Researchers examining 135 popular kids apps on Android and iOS find 88% of paid and 100% of free apps often have manipulative and distracting ads  —  Popular apps for young kids, especially those available in Google's app store, are teeming with advertisements that distract them from play …
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Mark Zuckerberg has been summoned to appear before an “international grand committee” of Canadian and UK MPs to discuss fake news on November 27  —  Two separate parliamentary committees, in the UK and Canada, have issued an unprecedented international joint summons for Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear before them.
Ina Fried / Axios:
Source: Rich DeVaul, a director at X, Alphabet's moonshot unit, left the company today following reports of sexual harassment, did not receive an exit package  —  Rich DeVaul, a director at X, the moonshot unit of Alphabet, Google's parent company, has left the company following reports of sexual harassment.
Rob Price / Business Insider:
Facebook says it is banning the far-right Proud Boys and co-founder Gavin McInnes from Facebook and Instagram after violent NY attack on protesters in October  —  - Facebook is banning accounts and groups associated with The Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group linked to political violence in the US.
Will Sommer / The Daily Beast:
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
eSIM support for Apple's new iPhones will not be available from AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile until later this year, but it is available in other countries  —  Apple today released iOS 12.1 with support for the digital eSIM that will allow for dual-SIM functionality on the iPhone XS …
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
The processor used in the 2018 MacBook Air is an Intel Core i5-8210Y 7W Amber Lake Y processor  —  Apple's newly upgraded MacBook Air is equipped with a 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 Processor with Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz, a chip configuration that does not match any of the 8th-generation chips that Intel has announced to date.
Monica Nickelsburg / GeekWire:
Lime pursues car sharing in Seattle, where rentable electric scooters are banned, and says it plans to add electric vehicles as another option to its app “soon”  —  Lime wants to add cars to its Seattle mobility fleet, expanding beyond the bright green, rentable bikes the company currently operates in the city.
More: CNET
Saheli Roy Choudhury / CNBC:
Samsung Electronics posts Q3 operating profit of ~$15.5B, up 21% YoY, driven by strong sales of memory chips and higher demand for high-end OLED display panels  —  - Samsung Electronics on Wednesday said it recorded an operating profit of 17.57 trillion won (about $15.5 billion) for the quarter ending in September.
Melanie Ehrenkranz / Gizmodo:
EU to launch a six-month trial of iBorderCtrl, an AI lie detector that looks for “biomarkers of deceit”, at its external borders in Hungary, Latvia, and Greece  —  A number of border control checkpoints in the European Union are about to get increasingly—and unsettlingly—futuristic.
More: Engadget

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Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
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Carolyn Said / San Francisco Chronicle:
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