Techmeme
December 27, 2017, 12:00 PM

Top News

Amazon.com:
During record-breaking holiday, Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa remote were #1 and #2 top sellers with “tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices” sold  —  Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote were the #1 and #2 top-selling products across all categories on Amazon
Samuel Axon / Ars Technica:
iPhone X's Face ID inexplicably can't approve family purchases as Touch ID could, requiring users to enter their passwords  —  Touch ID could be used before, but iPhone X owners must enter their passwords.  —  iPhone X owners have found that Face ID isn't available as an authentication method for the …
Rick Webb / NewCo Shift:
The vision of internet pioneers that a globally connected, transparent world with free access to information is inevitably good turned out to be wrong  —  I'm sorry I was wrong.  We all were.  Last night, as I was falling asleep after a lovely Christmas, a thought popped into my head.
Lizzie Plaugic / The Verge:
US Library of Congress will no longer archive the text of every tweet, will instead archive tweets on a “very selective basis”; the archive has yet to go online  —  The Library of Congress just announced some changes to its long-running plan to archive all of Twitter.
Chris Hamby / BuzzFeed:
Sources: Safran, which sells fingerprint-analysis software used by FBI, 18K+ US law enforcement agencies, didn't disclose some code was from Kremlin-linked firm  —  In a secret deal, a French company purchased code from a Kremlin-connected firm, incorporated it into its own software …
Washington Post:
Dave Smith / Business Insider:
HQ Trivia arrives on Android in limited beta and says its goal is full availability by January 1  —  - The app's makers say they are working to get HQ Trivia in the hands of all Android users on January 1, 2018.  —  HQ Trivia, the hottest iPhone game of 2017, previously said it would release an Android version in time for Christmas.
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
WhatsApp will drop BlackBerry OS and Windows Phone support on December 31  —  WhatsApp has detailed its plans for older mobile operating systems, with less than a week before the end of the year.  The Facebook-owned app will end support for BlackBerry OS (including BlackBerry 10) and Windows Phone 8.0 (and older) on December 31, 2017.
Andrew Tarantola / Engadget:
San Jose-based Energous, which is developing wireless charging tech that works from three feet away, says the FCC has approved its product, set for debut at CES  —  Charging your mobile device wirelessly is certainly less of a hassle than plugging it in, but still requires the device …
Greg Bensinger / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Uber to sell US subprime auto-leasing business, Xchange Leasing, to car marketplace Fair.com; net book value of Xchange's 30K+ vehicles was ~$400M  —  Ride-hailing firm had planned to wind down the business after losses  —  Uber Technologies Inc. has agreed to sell …

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