Techmeme
February 19, 2020, 8:40 AM

Top News

Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Twitter acquires Chroma Labs, which makes tools for video and photo creation, will split team across product, design, and engineering, shut down Chroma Stories  —  - Company builds photo, video-editing features for social media  — Chroma will join Twitter to work on ‘conversations’ products
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook is internally testing a tabbed version of News Feed for mobile that includes the Most Relevant feed, the Most Recent feed, and an Already Seen feed  —  Facebook may make it easier to escape its ranking algorithm and explore the News Feed in different formats.
Corbin Davenport / Android Police:
Mozilla releases its VPN service Firefox Private Network on Android in a closed beta for $4.99/month  —  Mozilla, the organization behind the much-loved Firefox web browser, has experimented with creating a VPN service for some time.  Unlike the VPNs packaged with browsers like Opera …
Nilesh Christopher / VICE:
An Indian election candidate created multiple deepfakes of his own video with him speaking different languages to access voters, reaching ~15M WhatsApp users  —  On February 7, a day ahead of the Legislative Assembly elections in Delhi, two videos of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) …
Hugh Son / CNBC:
LendingClub is acquiring Boston-based online bank Radius Bancorp in a deal valued at $185M, making it the first US fintech company to acquire a bank  —  - LendingClub, a fintech company that pioneered personal loans made online, is buying a U.S. bank to give it access to a stable and cheaper source of funding, CNBC has learned.
Richard Cooke / Wired:
A tribute to Wikipedia, which is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web  —  People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web.  Now it's a beacon of so much that's right.
Nicholas Quah / Hot Pod News:
Patreon has launched Patreon Capital, which provides creators with cash advances they pay back with slight interest using income earned on the platform  —  I was tempted to kick this story off with a platitude along the lines of: “Starting something is the hardest part.”
Jon Fingas / Engadget:
Ring makes two-factor authentication mandatory and pauses use of most third-party analytics services as it devises ways to limit data sharing with third parties  —  Ring is continuing its bid to improve privacy and security after facing criticism.  As of today, the Amazon brand will start requiring …
Steven Overly / Politico:
Judge rules that Huawei does not have grounds to sue the US government over a law banning federal agencies and their contractors from buying Huawei products  —  A federal judge ruled today that Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei does not have grounds to sue the U.S. government …
Steve O'Hear / TechCrunch:
Atomico announces its fifth fund has closed at $820M, bringing their total assets to $2.7B; Atomico will mostly fund European startups at Series A  —  Atomico, the European venture capital firm founded by Skype's Niklas Zennström, has announced that it has closed its fifth fund …
Robert Hof / SiliconANGLE:
Dell announces it is selling its RSA cybersecurity firm to a consortium led by private equity firm Symphony Technology Group for $2.075B  —  Updated:  —  Dell Technologies Inc. announced Tuesday it's selling its venerable RSA Security LLC business to a consortium led by Palo Alto …
Taiga Uranaka / Bloomberg:
Sources: Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group is investing $700M in ride hailing giant Grab, intends to market its financial services to Grab's users  —  - MUFG gains access to millions of users in Southeast Asia  — Grab is trying to build a regional super-app like WeChat
Alfred Ng / CNET:
ElectionGuard, the open-source voting machine software Microsoft announced in May 2019, gets its first real-world test today in a local vote in Fulton, WI  —  ElectionGuard isn't designed to make voting machines safe from hackers.  It's meant to make hacking them pointless.

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