Techmeme
August 15, 2018, 3:15 PM

Top News

Steven Musil / CNET:
Twitter puts account of Alex Jones in read-only mode for seven days after a tweet violated policy; he can browse but can't tweet, retweet, or like other posts  —  Twitter has cut off Alex Jones from key functions of his account after the founder and star of conspiracy site Infowars violated another Twitter policy.
Alyssa Newcomb / NBC News:
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defends decision to just give Infowars' Alex Jones a timeout after Jones urged viewers to ready “battle rifles” against media and others  —  “We can't build a service that is subjective just to the whims of what we personally believe," Dorsey told NBC News' Lester Holt in an exclusive interview.
Selina Wang / Bloomberg:
Y Combinator names former Baidu COO Qi Lu as CEO of Y Combinator China, a new Chinese arm it says may start as soon as next summer  —  - This marks the seed investor's first international program  — Former Baidu COO, Qi Lu, will oversee the rollout in China
Steve Stecklow / Reuters:
Investigation finds 1,000+ Facebook posts, comments, images, and videos attacking Rohingya in Myanmar, highlighting Facebook's woeful attempts to fix the issue  —  Reuters found more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and pornographic images attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims on Facebook.
Ry Crist / CNET:
Amazon and Microsoft begin rolling out Alexa and Cortana integrations, with the ability to ask each assistant to “open” the other  —  Alexa and Cortana: Tech's new BFFs?  —  That's the premise behind a cooperative effort from Amazon and Microsoft that lets Alexa users cue up Cortana on their Echo speakers.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum has continued to show up at least monthly at the Facebook office to secure his stock rewards of ~$450M  —  Jan Koum said he was leaving Facebook in April, but has been making periodic appearances in the office to secure stock rewards
Bloomberg:
Sources: China freezes game approvals amid a restructuring within regulatory administrations, affecting all online, mobile, and console games  —  - The halt has shaken Tencent as smaller players struggle  — Regulatory administrations are said to be under restructuring
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Sources: Amazon's Twitch has been pursuing exclusive livestreaming deals with popular companies and personalities, offering millions per year in some cases  —  It wants to turn its Twitch online hangout for avid gamers into a broader video service.  —  YouTube has become synonymous …
Zeynep Tufekci / MIT Technology Review:
How digital technologies and social media went from being hailed as tools of freedom during the Arab Spring to being blamed for upheavals in Western democracies  —  To understand how digital technologies went from instruments for spreading democracy to weapons for attacking it, you have to look beyond the technologies themselves.
Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
Researchers detail Foreshadow, a speculative execution flaw in secure enclaves on Intel processors, mitigated by May/June microcode fixes, patches coming today  —  IN CYBERSECURITY CIRCLES, this has been the year of Spectre and Meltdown, not only because the chip vulnerabilities …
Gregory Barber / Wired:
Coinbase acquires the five-person team behind Distributed Systems to help Coinbase find ways to integrate decentralized identity across its services  —  EARLIER THIS YEAR, the executors of #DeleteFacebook engaged in a form of decentralized group therapy.  Catharsis came in a zip file downloaded …

Sponsor Posts

Meta:
Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few  —  Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.
Tribe AI:
Build AI products that matter  —  Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact.  We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.
Zoho:
5 common accounting mistakes  —  This is a guest post by Yaali Bizappln Solutions.  A lot of businesses manage their customers and finances on separate platforms.  This disconnect often leads to missed invoices …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Fri. 11/22 - An LLM Siri But... Only The Year AFTER Next?
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:15 PM ET, August 15, 2018.

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.

More News

Andy Kroll / Rolling Stone:

Earlier Picks

Sijia Jiang / Reuters:
Karissa Bell / Mashable: