Techmeme
October 17, 2018, 4:05 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.
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.
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.
Kate Fazzini / CNBC:
Apple rolls out an updated privacy portal 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.
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.
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.
Kyle Bradshaw / 9to5Google:
YouTube says it has resolved widespread access issues that also affected YouTube TV and YouTube Music  —  Google's services are ubiquitous enough that it's pretty noteworthy when they go down.  Tonight, it seems multiple services are suffering an outage, including YouTube …
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
Peter Bright / Ars Technica:
Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla have announced a unified plan to deprecate the use of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in their web browsers in early 2020  —  Almost everyone has now migrated to TLS 1.2, and a few have moved to TLS 1.3.  —  Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla have announced …
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Samsung acquires Spanish network analytics company Zhilabs, which uses AI to monitor carriers' network performance and data traffic across myriad services  —  Samsung has announced that it has acquired Zhilabs, a Spanish network analytics company that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) …
Dan Thorp-Lancaster / Windows Central:
Microsoft begins testing a major redesign of the iOS and Android Cortana apps, with a focus on conversational experiences and more  —  Microsoft is gearing up to release a major update to Cortana on Android and iOS, and beta testers are getting the first shot at it.
More: MacRumors and The Verge
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 …
Cate Cadell / Reuters:
Baidu joins the Partnership on AI, led by US companies like Apple and Google, becoming the first Chinese company to join an AI ethics group  —  BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese search engine Baidu Inc (BIDU.O) has become the first Chinese company to join an artificial intelligence (AI) …

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