Techmeme
February 8, 2019, 6:05 PM

Top News

Washington Post:
Sources: after a wave of opposition in New York, Amazon execs have had internal discussions recently to reassess the situation and explore alternatives for HQ2  —  Amazon.com is reconsidering its plan to bring 25,000 jobs to a new campus in New York City following a wave of opposition from local politicians …
Richard Lawler / Engadget:
Sprint sues AT&T over its “5G Evolution” branding, claims it is false and deceptive advertising that is damaging the reputation of actual 5G  —  After AT&T decided to start rolling out “5G Evolution” branding on phones and networks that use 4G LTE Advanced technology …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Google warns about two iOS zero-day vulnerabilities that hackers have been actively exploiting; the vulnerabilities have been fixed in iOS 12.1.4  —  iOS users are advised to update to iOS 12.1.4; release which also fixes infamous FaceTime bug.  —  A Google top security engineer …
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac:
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Google unveils Adiantum, a new form of encryption for data on lower-end smartphones and other devices with insufficient processing power  —  Google officially unveiled a new form of encryption today, designed to secure data stored on lower-end smartphones and other devices with insufficient processing power.
Roger Parloff / Yahoo! Finance:
Alex Stamos and 19 people who knew him professionally over the course of his career talk about his work at various startups, Yahoo, Facebook, and now, Stanford  —  Alex Stamos, whose highest degree is a BS in computer science and electrical engineering, delivered his first academic lecture.
Tweets: @readdanwrite, @k8em0, @mathewi, and @mathewiThanks:@jpmanga
The Moscow Times:
Report: Google pulls government-banned sites from Russian search results, blocking ~70% of sites blacklisted by Russia's communications regulator Roskomnadzor  —  Google has started to remove certain entries from its search results in Russia in compliance with long-standing demands from the authorities …
Brendan Nyhan / Medium:
Research comparing 2016 and 2018 suggests Facebook's efforts to limit the reach of fake news are working, but the platform's scale remains an alluring target  —  After the shock of the 2016 presidential election, many Americans found psychological refuge in a simple explanation for why Donald Trump won: “fake news.”
Jeff Bezos:
Jeff Bezos publishes letters from National Enquirer owner AMI that he says show threats to publish his nude photos unless he stops probing AMI's reporting  —  Something unusual happened to me yesterday.  Actually, for me it wasn't just unusual—it was a first.  I was made an offer I couldn't refuse.
Reuters:
IAC's Vimeo generated $160M in revenue in 2018, up from $103.3M in 2017 as its subscribers grew to 952,000, up 9% YoY  —  (Reuters) - Online video platform Vimeo's revenue jumped 54 percent last year as its subscriber base surpassed 950,000, its parent group IAC said on Thursday.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Amazon joins Microsoft in expressing support for regulating facial recognition tech, offers guidelines for the “responsible use” of the technology  —  Amazon supports the creation of a “legislative framework” covering facial recognition technology.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Twitter reports Q4 revenue of $909M, up 24% YoY, ad revenue of $791M, up 23% YoY, net income of $244M, and MAUs of 321M, down by 9M YoY  —  After strong results from Facebook and Snap this quarter, all eyes were on Twitter to see if the other big, publicly listed social network could deliver a hat trick of growth.

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Earlier Picks

Jason Hiner / CNET:
BBC: