Techmeme
May 23, 2019, 4:35 AM

Top News

New York Times:
Google says around 25% of calls placed using its Duplex AI service started with a human; calls to ~12 restaurants found people made 3 of 4 successful bookings  —  In a free service, bots call restaurants and make reservations.  The technology is impressive, except for when the caller is actually a person.
Andrew Webster / The Verge:
Software maker Panic unveils Playdate, a Game Boy-like device with a hand crank control and 12 bundled games released over time, coming in 2020 for $149  —  Little, yellow, different  —  Panic made its name through high-end Mac software, but more recently, the company moved into gaming …
Dave Lee / BBC:
Natalia Drozdiak / Bloomberg:
Bloomberg:
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Ireland's Data Protection Commission, the lead EU supervisory authority for Google, announces investigation into Google's online advertising data collection  —  KEY POINTS  — Ireland's Data Protection Commission says its probe will examine whether Google's processing of data in advertising transactions breaches EU privacy rules.
Tara Seals / Threatpost:
Researcher shares zero-day Windows 10 local privilege escalation exploit that grants full control over files reserved for full-privilege users  —  A Windows zero-day exploit dropped by developer SandboxEscaper would allow local privilege-escalation (LPE), by importing legacy tasks from other systems into the Task Scheduler utility.
Mark Scott / Politico:
GDPR has helped big tech companies cement their dominance in the data economy while smaller companies have suffered from relatively high compliance costs  —  The region's data protection overhaul was supposed to help citizens.  Instead, it's helped Big Tech.
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Apple unveils Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution, aimed at preserving user privacy without reducing effectiveness of ads, coming soon to Safari  —  For years, the web has been largely free thanks to online ads.  The problem is that nobody likes them.  When they're not obnoxiously taking …
Ginny Marvin / Search Engine Land:
Google begins rolling out an updated mobile search design with a black “ad” label and favicons for all organic results  —  The new look brings some branding to the search results, and preps the mobile search for more types of content and actions for users to take right from the search results.
Alastair Marsh / Bloomberg:
Source: Block.one, which raised ~$4B in its ICO, has made $174M in VC investments and bought back 10% of its stock, rewarding early investors like Peter Thiel  —  Billionaire moneymen Peter Thiel, Alan Howard and Louis Bacon have seen plenty of big paydays—but probably none as unusual as this one.
Keith Barry / Consumer Reports:
Testing finds Tesla's updated Autopilot software, designed to make changing lanes “more seamless”, does not work well and could create safety risks for drivers  —  CR finds that latest version of Tesla's automatic lane-changing feature is far less competent than a human driver
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Amazon shareholders reject two non-binding proposals to ban sale of facial recognition tech to government customers, despite pressure from ACLU and others  —  Amazon shareholders have rejected two proposals that would have requested the company not to sell its facial recognition technology to government customers.
Emily Stewart / Vox:
Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:

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Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:

Earlier Picks

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