Techmeme
October 17, 2018, 9:35 PM

Top News

Bloomberg:
Twitter has published data sets of millions of tweets, images, videos, and thousands of accounts linked to Russia and Iran meddling for analysis by researchers  —  - Data includes images and videos from thousands of accounts  — Tech firms remain under fire from lawmakers in EU, U.S.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Andy Rubin's Essential confirms layoffs; sources say it's almost a third of its workforce, primarily from the startup's hardware and sales divisions  —  Essential Products Inc., the startup founded by Android creator Andy Rubin, has cut almost a third of its employees.  —  “This has been a difficult decision to make.
Financial Times:
Softbank COO says “there is no certainty” that there will be another Vision Fund, as the firm is “anxiously looking” at fallout from Khashoggi's disappearance  —  SoftBank has voiced its doubts about the likelihood of a second $100bn Vision Fund for the first time …
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
How a loophole in Facebook's political ad review system, letting verified buyers put anything in the “paid for by” field, has been weaponized in a Virginia race  —  A competitive race in Virginia's 10th Congressional District has an alarming new element: anonymous attack ads on Facebook.
Valentina Palladino / Ars Technica:
Spotify announces a standalone app for Wear OS that lets users control and browse music, rolling out over the next week  —  Browse, play, and add songs to your library from Spotify's new on-wrist app.  —  Wear OS gains a popular new app today that many have been waiting for …
Kate Fazzini / CNBC:
Apple rolls out an updated privacy website, first trialed in the EU in May, that lets customers search the information Apple has on them  —  - Apple's new privacy website launch fulfills a company promise of making it easier and faster for customers to find what personal information is kept by Apple.
Suzanne Vranica / Wall Street Journal:
Advertisers allege in suit that Facebook didn't disclose key video metric error for over a year and that scale of miscalculation was far worse than understood  —  Facebook knew of problems with how it measured viewership of video ads for more than a year before it revealed them in 2016, according to a complaint filed by advertisers.
Wall Street Journal:
Profile of Kris Goldsmith, an Army veteran who catalogues questionable Facebook Pages, some with millions of followers and links to Russia and Iran  —  Kris Goldsmith has become the cybersleuth for the Vietnam Veterans of America, hunting fake Facebook pages that sow discord and often have roots overseas
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
Helm launches a privacy-focused personal server, costing $499 with a $99/year subscription, that lets users host emails, calendars, and contacts  —  Here's the thing: for all the talk about her email server, Hillary Clinton did not get hacked.  “I'll go on record with that,” says Giri Sreenivas, the founder of Helm.
Nicholas Thompson / Wired:
Interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on free speech, filter bubbles, the chronological feed, and more  —  ON MONDAY, AT Wired's 25th anniversary summit, I spoke with Jack Dorsey about some of the biggest questions he confronts running Twitter and Square.  How has his position on free speech evolved?
More: Wired and The Verge
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Sidestepping App Stores, Facebook Lite and Groups get Instant Games, which launch in browsers  —  HTML5 almost ruined Facebook when baking in the mobile web standard to speed up development slowed down the performance of the social network's main iOS and Android apps.
Medium:
Anonymous Amazon employee says 450+ employees signed letter to Bezos and other execs asking them to stop selling Rekognition to police and kick Palantir off AWS  —  When a company puts new technologies into the world, it has a responsibility to think about the consequences.
Financial Times:
Sources: Uber is considering taking minority stake investments to help finance its costly self-driving car unit amid pressure from investors ahead of its IPO  —  Uber is considering taking minority stake investments to help finance its costly self-driving car unit amid pressure from investors ahead …
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
In EU, Google to start charging OEMs for Play Store and Google apps, offer separate licenses for Search and Chrome, let OEMs make devices with forked Android  —  Android will still be “free and open source”  —  Google is changing the way it licenses its suite of Android apps in Europe …

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