Techmeme
December 5, 2018, 10:05 AM

Top News

Jessica Dolcourt / CNET:
Qualcomm announces 3D Sonic Sensor, a new under-display fingerprint sensor for smartphones that uses sound waves to map fingerprints  —  After years of prototypes and fine-tuning, Qualcomm on Tuesday finally announced a fingerprint reader that uses sound to unlock your phone.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 855, which supports “multi-gigabit 5G” and promises up to 3X better AI performance than last gen  —  This week, Qualcomm is hosting press and analysts on Maui for its annual Snapdragon Summit.  Sadly, we're not there, but a couple of weeks ago, Qualcomm gave us a preview of the news.
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
A test ride in Waymo One, the first commercial self-driving taxi service launching next week in Phoenix for members of its Early Rider program  —  Going on a coffee run with Waymo One  —  It is late afternoon in Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, and I'm getting jittery waiting …
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Facebook's ranking drops from No. 1 to No. 7 in Glassdoor's 2019 list of best places to work in the US chosen by employees; Google is 8th and Microsoft is 34th  —  Career website Glassdoor today released its 11th annual Employees' Choice Awards, a list of the 100 best companies to work for in the coming year.
Jay Stanley / American Civil Liberties Union:
US Secret Service to test facial recognition in and around the White House according to a document released by DHS last week  —  In yet another step toward the normalization of facial recognition as a blanket security measure, last week the Department of Homeland Security published details …
Brian Heater / TechCrunch:
Following Verizon, AT&T says it too will sell an as-yet unannounced 5G Samsung handset in the first half of 2019  —  Samsung announced yesterday that it's set to bring a 5G phone to market in the first half of next year, name-checking Verizon in the promise.
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Microsoft open sources its most popular Windows UX frameworks and says the first preview of .NET Core 3.0 is now available  —  Microsoft is open sourcing WPF, Windows Forms and Win UI via GitHub and making available the first public preview of Visual Studio 2019.
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook says it will let developers build competitors to its features on its platform, reversing an earlier policy  —  Facebook will now freely allow developers to build competitors to its features upon its own platform.  Today Facebook announced it will drop Platform Policy section 4.1 which stipulates …
Bryan Menegus / Gizmodo:
NYC approves measures to set the US' first minimum pay rate for rideshare drivers of $26.51/hour gross, or an estimated $17.22/hour after expenses  —  Today, New York's City's Taxi and Limousine Commission approved measures to enact minimum pay requirements for app-based for-hire vehicles (FHV) like Uber, Lyft, and Juno.
Tony Lystra / GeekWire:
A new crop of productivity and collaboration apps like Quip and Airtable aim to reinvent Office with quick sharing and simple interfaces within a single window  —  Microsoft, more than any other institution on earth, has shaped how we work and how we think about it.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Alphabet's Wing business boss James Burgess says it plans to start a trial drone delivery service in Helsinki, Finland, starting in spring 2019  —  Wing, the drone delivery X project that “graduated” into full company status under the Alphabet umbrella this past July, is taking flight in Europe.
Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
Microsoft expands its US rural broadband initiative, aiming to operate in 25 states by the end of 2019 and reach 3M customers by July 2022  —  Microsoft Corp., which last year announced a plan to bring broadband to 2 million people in the rural U.S., is boosting the program to reach another 1 million customers across more states.
Politico:
Sources: officials at NRCC, the House GOP's campaign arm, had several months' worth of emails stolen in 2018 by what some think was a nation-state hacker  —  Republican leaders were not informed until POLITICO contacted committee officials about the incident.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols / ZDNet:
Flaw discovered in Kubernetes lets any user gain full admin privileges on any compute node being run in a Kubernetes cluster; patched versions are available  —  There's now an invisible way to hack into the popular cloud container orchestration system Kubernetes.
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Google launches Flutter 1.0, its cross-platform UI toolkit and SDK for building Android and iOS apps, as Square announces two new Flutter SDKs for easy payments  —  At Flutter Live in London today, Google launched version 1. of Flutter, the company's open source mobile UI framework …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Pindrop, which provides voice-fraud prevention tech to devices that work with voice commands, raises $90M Series D led by London's Vitruvian Partners  —  When it comes to how humans communicate with each other or with machines, voice is a major interface, with growth in the latter fuelled …
More: VentureBeatThanks:@ingridlunden
Joseph Menn / Reuters:
Jon Callas, co-founder of Silent Circle, Blackphone, and PGP Corp, has left his senior security role at Apple to take a job at the ACLU  —  SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A senior Apple Inc security expert left for a much lower-paying job at the American Civil Liberties Union this week …

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