Techmeme
October 24, 2017, 7:20 AM

Top News

Alex Hern / The Guardian:
Facebook testing News Feed change in six countries, moving non-promoted posts from Pages to a secondary feed, decreasing engagement for some media  —  New system could destroy smaller publishers if implemented, after journalists report drop in organic reach - but users will still see their friends' posts
Adam Mosseri / Facebook Media:
Facebook says its News Feed test is about emphasis of personal stories, no plans to expand to more countries or ask publishers to pay for all distribution  —  There have been a number of reports about a test we're running in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Microsoft drops suit against the US DoJ after the department announced new policy to limit the use gag orders by prosecutors for accessing customer data  —  Microsoft says it's dropping a suit against the U.S. Justice Department that targeted a tactic commonly used by prosecutors …
Tom Dotan / The Information:
Sources: Snap overestimated demand for Spectacles, has hundreds of thousands of unsold units in warehouses; Evan Spiegel previously said sales beat expectations  —  Snap badly overestimated demand for its Spectacles and now has hundreds of thousands of unsold units sitting in warehouses …
Michael Balsamo / Associated Press:
FBI Director Christopher Wray says in first 11 months of fiscal year, agents were unable to unlock over half the mobile devices it tried to access, over 6,900+  —  PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The FBI hasn't been able to retrieve data from more than half of the mobile devices it tried to access in less than a year …
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Microsoft Azure customers can now run workloads on Cray supercomputers  —  Microsoft and Cray are teaming to give Azure customers with data-intentsive HPC, AI workloads access to Cray supercomputers running in select Microsoft datacenters.  —  Microsoft and Cray are enabling Azure customers …
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
FTC failed in allowing Facebook to acquire Instagram, WhatsApp; it should intervene on tbh, regardless of whether the purchase price is enough to mandate review  —  There was one line in TechCrunch's report about Facebook's purchase of social app tbh [sic] that made me raise my eyebrows (emphasis mine):
Bloomberg:
Cisco to buy telecommunications software company BroadSoft for ~$1.9B to expand further into software and cloud services  —  Cisco Systems Inc. agreed to buy BroadSoft Inc. for about $1.9 billion to expand further into software and cloud services.  —  Cisco will pay $55 a share in cash …
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Snapchat updates iOS app with link sharing from other apps, introduces temporary opt-out options for Snap Map  —  Snapchat is embracing links beyond its native content and will now allow you to briefly disappear from its Snap Map.  In an update to Snapchat's iOS apptoday, Snap began rolling out two important new features.
Stan Higgins / CoinDesk:
E-sports betting startup Unikrn, backed by Mark Cuban, raises $31M in ICO; Unikoin Gold token to act as a medium of exchange for bettors to use on the platform  —  E-sports betting startup Unikrn has raised roughly $31 million in an initial coin offering.  —  The firm collected 112,720 ethers …
More: Quartz

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Kim Zetter / The Intercept:
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