Techmeme
October 19, 2020, 3:30 AM

Top News

The Markup:
The Markup announces The Citizen Browser Project, an initiative with The NYT to analyze how the algorithms of Facebook and YouTube serve content to users  —  The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates how the world's most powerful institutions use technology to reshape society …
Agence France-Presse:
Nick Clegg says 2.2M proposed ads on Facebook and Instagram have been rejected and 120K posts withdrawn for attempting to “obstruct voting” in the US elections  —  A total of 2.2m ads on Facebook and Instagram have been rejected and 120,000 posts withdrawn for attempting to …
Matthew Ball / MatthewBall.vc:
Audio, which struggled for decades as a media category, is breaking out now, as tech enables new content formats as well as new monetization and delivery models  —  As most of the major media categories — music, video and video games — have existed for decades, we tend to forget that media is technology.
Alex Konrad / Forbes:
Profile of Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and ex-Sequoia partner Matt Huang, whose VC firm Paradigm moved all $400M of its initial capital into Bitcoin in 2018  —  Covering venture capital, software and startups  —  An aggressive Bitcoin trade got crypto VC shop Paradigm flying out of the gate.
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Thoughts on Apple's “Hi, Speed” event: the iPhone 12 lineup, camera differences, missing chargers and earbuds, focus on 5G and Verizon CEO's cameo, more  —  Last month's “Time Flies” event for the Apple Watch Series 6 and new iPad Air was about an hour long; this week's “Hi, Speed” event ran just a bit longer at 70 minutes.
Filipe Espósito / 9to5Mac:
Anil Ananthaswamy / Knowable Magazine:
A look at “neurosymbolic AI”, which combines techniques of deep neural networks and “good old-fashioned AI”, with comments from its proponents and critics  —  The unlikely marriage of two major artificial intelligence approaches has given rise to a new hybrid called neurosymbolic AI.
Colum Murphy / Bloomberg:
China passes a new export control law, in effect from Dec. 1, that will let it take reciprocal measures if any country or regions abuse their export controls  —  China passed a new law to restrict sensitive exports to protect national security, helping Beijing gain reciprocity against U.S. as tech tensions mount.
Ian Carlos Campbell / The Verge:
Google will discontinue its Trusted Contacts app Dec. 2, pointing users to Maps features instead; the app helped users check on contacts during emergencies  —  The suggested alternative is a stripped-down Google Maps feature  —  Google will discontinue its emergency location sharing app Trusted Contacts …
More: Mashable
Daniel Oberhaus / Wired:
An overview on the current state of AI-driven battery research, which until recently was hampered by a lack of data but is now poised to pick up the pace  —  Improving batteries has always been hampered by slow experimentation and discovery processes.  Machine learning is speeding it up by orders of magnitude.
Vijaya Gadde / @vijaya:
[Thread] Twitter updates Hacked Materials Policy, says it won't remove content unless shared by hackers themselves and will label tweets instead of block links  —  Over the last 24 hours, we've received significant feedback (from critical to supportive) about how we enforced our Hacked Materials Policy yesterday. After reflecting on this feedback, we have decided to make changes to the policy and how we enforce it.

Sponsor Posts

SignalFire:
SignalFire raises another $1 billion to back applied AI startups  —  We build AI too.  It tracks 650M tech employees so we can help companies with recruiting and GTM across enterprise, infra, healthcare, security, and consumer.
UiPath:
Introducing the UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation  —  UiPath's new platform empowers enterprises to experience the full power of AI to transform industries
Zoho:
In-depth bounce reports now in ZeptoMail  —  The ultimate aim of any email sender is to deliver emails to the right recipient's inbox—but even when taking measures to ensure successful delivery, bounces still occur.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

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More News

BBC:

Earlier Picks

Laurens Cerulus / Politico:
Stephen Totilo / Kotaku:
Morgan Clendaniel / Fast Company: