Techmeme: Every ad, political or commercial, should reveal its provenance, and all advertisers should stand by their ads and be held accountable for them (Tarleton Gillespie/Slate)

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November 23, 2019, 1:45 PM

Top News

Queenie Wong / CNET:

Facebook built a now discontinued internal app, report says between 2015 and 2016, that let employees identify colleagues and friends via facial recognition — Facebook , which has been under fire because of privacy concerns, said Thursday it built an internal app that allowed employees …

Source: Business Insider. More: Mashable, MSPoweruser, VentureBeat, and Seeking Alpha

Tweets: @robaeprice, @xeni, @pauldokas, @jkarsh, @tonyromm, @coreen_anne, @brooklynmarie, @dtunkelang, @fchollet, @robaeprice, @clarajeffery, @oknox, and @robaeprice

Cory Weinberg / The Information:

Source: Airbnb lost about $100M in Q2 2019, compared to the profit of $10M it made a year ago — Airbnb lost about $100 million before interest and taxes in the second quarter this year, a big swing from the profit of $10 million it made in the year-earlier period, according to financial information viewed by The Information.

Tweets: @coryweinberg, @modestproposal1, @edbott, and @eliotwb

Deirdre Bosa / CNBC:

Airbnb announces that COO Belinda Johnson will step down from her role in March 2020, but will join the company's board of directors as its ninth member

More: Airbnb Newsroom, Observer, Yahoo Finance, and Seeking Alpha. Tweets: @dee_bosa

Monica Nickelsburg / GeekWire:

Amazon filed its formal protest over JEDI on Friday, citing a Fox News segment and a Trump rally as evidence of improper political pressure from the White House — Amazon filed its formal protest over Microsoft's victory in a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract …

More: Washington Post, Vox, SiliconANGLE, Axios, and Fortune

Tweets: @keithboykin, @megawatts55, and @paulkrugman. Thanks:@taylor_soper

Tarleton Gillespie / Slate:

Every ad, political or commercial, should reveal its provenance, and all advertisers should stand by their ads and be held accountable for them — On Oct. 30, Twitter announced it would now prohibit political advertising on its platform. On Friday, it tried its best to explain exactly what that would mean.

More: Electronic Frontier Foundation. Tweets: @bowlinearl and @frankpasquale

Ernie Smith / VICE:

As Slack gets criticism from power users for its WYSIWYG editor and plans an option to revert, a look at the history of Markdown, used by Slack's old interface — Slack just updated its longtime editor for its primary interface—and the rich-text result hints at a longstanding tension …

More: MSPoweruser. Tweets: @alexislloyd, @vice, @artemr, @shortformernie, @katienotopoulos, @carnage4life, and @wongmjane

Rachel Metz / CNN:

How facial analysis software that classifies gender misidentifies trans and non-binary people, is inaccurate with people of color, and could harm these groups — San Francisco (CNN)Artificial intelligence doesn't know what to make of Os Keyes. — The 29-year-old graduate student is dark-haired …

More: KnowTechie

Jon Fingas / Engadget:

FCC bans carriers from using federal subsidies to buy equipment from Huawei and ZTE, considers ordering subsidy recipients to replace current Chinese equipment — The FCC is acting on its vow to keep Chinese technology out of American wireless networks. Commissioners have unanimously approved …

More: Federal Communications …, Reuters, Washington Post, Axios, Reuters, CNET, International Business Times, MSPoweruser, Android Authority, Politico, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, CRN, PCMag, Telecompaper, Light Reading, Light Reading, Seeking Alpha, The Verge, GeekWire, and MacDailyNews

Tweets: @repjimbanks, @sentedcruz, and @fcc

Kashmir Hill / New York Times:

A look at the Legal Aid Society of New York City's efforts to close the tech gap between public defenders and law enforcement with respect to digital forensics — Public defenders lack access to gadgets and software that could keep their clients out of jail. — On April 27, a woman in eastern Brooklyn called the police.

Tweets: @geomblog, @nytimes, @kashhill, and @tmluongo

Alexandra Witze / Nature:

Experts say ITU's newly agreed 5G radio-frequency standards will interfere with weather satellite readings of water vapor, impacting weather forecasts worldwide — Meteorologists say international standards for wireless technology could degrade crucial satellite measurements of water vapour.

More: Washington Post, The Verge, Science, and WebProNews

Tweets: @alexwitze, @mikamckinnon, @alexwitze, and @alexwitze

Natalie Jarvey / Hollywood Reporter:

Inside Spotify's plan to dominate audio by spending hundreds of millions on exclusive podcasts and recruiting Jordan Peele, Mark Wahlberg and the Obamas — Having helped transform the music industry, Ek and content chief Dawn Ostroff set their sights (and your ears) on spending hundreds …

More: Tubefilter. Tweets: @jimprosser, @john, @thr, and @trengriffin

Rita Liao / TechCrunch:

Profile of Dongtu, a China-based Giphy-like service that is baked into some 3,000 apps with chatting features, including WeChat, Alibaba's Taobao, and Weibo — With its own universe of homegrown social networks, e-commerce platforms and search engines, the Chinese internet is a world apart …

Shannon Liao / CNN:

Facebook says it has signed Jeremy Wang, aka Disguised Toast, a Twitch streamer with 1M+ followers, to Facebook Gaming, its live game streaming platform — New York (CNN)Facebook (FB) just nabbed a major player for its gaming platform as it continues to ramp up efforts to compete in the video game streaming wars.

More: Washington Post, Engadget, Polygon, The Verge, Hollywood Reporter, and The Esports Observer

Tweets: @darkviperau, @dotesports, @comicbook, @thr, @daniel_duan, @dotodoya, @disguisedtoast, and @mattnavarra

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 1:45 PM ET, November 23, 2019.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

Associated Press:

President Trump signed an EO on May 1 instructing CPB and other agencies to cut federal funding for NPR and PBS, alleging “bias” in the broadcasters' reporting

Brian Stelter / CNN:

Radio Free Asia is laying off most of its staff and shutting down many of its news broadcasts and streams due to a funding battle with the Trump administration

Bron Maher / Press Gazette:

RSF's 2025 Press Freedom Index classifies media freedom globally as “difficult”, a first; economic score hits a record low due to ownership concentration, more

More News

Mark Bergen / Bloomberg:

About 200 Googlers protest placing of two of their colleagues on administrative leave over the actions they took opposing some of Google management's decisions

More: CNET, Vox, OneZero, Forbes, Fast Company, Gizmodo, and VentureBeat. Tweets: @josheidelson

Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News:

REX, a real estate broker that claims its AI allows it to price homes more accurately and charge lower commissions, raises $40M, bringing total raised to $115M

More: Built In Austin, SiliconHills, HousingWire, and FinSMEs

Katie Williams / Sensor Tower Blog:

There were 29.6B app downloads from 792K publishers globally in Q3 across App Store and Google Play; 1% of top publishers accounted for 80% of all downloads

More: TechCrunch and iPhone in Canada Blog. Tweets: @deaconlf

Jane Lanhee Lee / Reuters:

Filing: outside the US and China, Airbnb had $2.42B in revenue in 2018, up 35%+ YoY, and $46.47M in profits, compared to a $97.22M loss in 2017

Jan Wolfe / Reuters:

Appeals court says Apple infringed only two of four VirnetX patents, vacates $503M jury award, sends the case back to Texas court to recalculate damages

More: Bloomberg Law, Patently Apple, iMore, AppleInsider, MacRumors, Slashdot, and Seeking Alpha

Earlier Picks

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:

ZecOps, which automates detection, analysis, and response to cyberattacks on endpoints and servers, raises $10.2M seed round

More: Pulse 2.0 and PR Newswire

Nicolas Vega / New York Post:

Sources: at an AWS conference in July, Amazon banned participating companies from mentioning its cloud competitors and using phrases such as “multi-cloud”

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @mhbergen, @nickcald, @counternotions, and @delrey

Tom Metcalf / Bloomberg:

Travis Kalanick has sold ~$1.5B worth of Uber stock since a post-IPO lockup expired on Nov. 6; a Nov. 11 filing suggests Kalanick could offload his entire stake

More: Coinspeaker and CNBC

Tweets: @scheplick, @alistairmbarr, @lisaabramowicz1, @darakerr, and @ericnewcomer

BBC:

Russia has passed a law banning devices not pre-installed with Russian software starting July 2020; govt to create a list of devices and Russian apps involved

More: Engadget, AppleInsider, CNET, iPhone Hacks, Gizchina, Decrypt, Gizmodo, Patently Apple, Android Central, Firstpost Tech, The Next Web, Telecoms.com, Xinhua News Agency, and CircleID

Tweets: @campuscodi, @el33th4xor, and @grady_booch

Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:

Twitter says users can now enroll in 2FA without a phone number and disable SMS-based 2FA as default, allows other methods such as mobile authenticator apps