Techmeme
January 25, 2019, 5:55 PM

Top News

Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Sources: Zuckerberg plans to add end-to-end encryption to Instagram and Messenger and integrate their messaging infrastructure and WhatsApp's by end of the year  —  SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, plans to integrate the social network's messaging services …
Nathan Halverson / Reveal:
Unsealed documents show Facebook orchestrated a multi-year effort that duped children who played video games into spending their parents' money  —  Facebook orchestrated a multi-year effort that duped children and their parents out of money, in some cases hundreds or even thousands of dollars …
Daisuke Wakabayashi / New York Times:
YouTube says it will no longer suggest videos with “borderline content” or those that “misinform users in a harmful way” even if they don't violate guidelines  —  SAN FRANCISCO — Whether it is a video claiming the earth is flat or the moon landing was faked …
Jon Fingas / Engadget:
Google confirms that I/O 2019 will take place from May 7 to May 9 at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View after a developer solves the I/O puzzle  —  If you're a fan of all things Google, you already have a date to mark on your calendar for 2019.  Developer Till Kottmann …
Guilherme Rambo / 9to5Mac:
Apple's first beta of iOS 12.2 for developers includes images of a magazine subscription service, rumored since Apple first bought Texture  —  There have been rumors about an Apple News subscription service since mid-2018, starting with a report by Bloomberg that said Apple was planing …
Natasha Singer / New York Times:
Amazon's Rekognition mistakes women as men 19% of the time, and darker-skinned women as men 31% of the time, more than similar services from IBM and Microsoft  —  In new tests, Amazon's system had more difficulty identifying the gender of female and darker-skinned faces than similar services from IBM and Microsoft.
Science:
Study of registered US voters in 2016: ~6% of all news consumed on Twitter was fake news, 1% of users were exposed to 80% of it and 0.1% shared 80% thereof  —  There was a proliferation of fake news during the 2016 election cycle.  Grinberg et al. analyzed Twitter data by matching Twitter accounts …
Tom Krazit / GeekWire:
Microsoft acquires Citus Data, which develops an open-source extension for PostgreSQL that turns it into a distributed database  —  Databases continue to be one of the most competitive areas of cloud computing, and Microsoft strengthened its database story Thursday with the acquisition of Citus Data.
Mariella Moon / Engadget:
HMD says it will soon sell its Nokia smartphones through Verizon and Cricket Wireless in US and Rogers in Canada  —  Nokia's parent company, HMD Global, chose to put its US ambitions in the back burner to focus on markets where the brand has been enjoying a resurgence these past few years.
Peter Kafka / Recode:
Sources: BuzzFeed and Group Nine have discussed merger; companies have ties via BuzzFeed's chairman Ken Lerer and his son Ben Lerer, CEO at Group Nine  —  BuzzFeed is cutting costs and getting leaner, but it still wants to get bigger — by exploring a deal with Group Nine.
Dami Lee / The Verge:
Tinder settles class action about charging users over 30 double the standard Tinder Plus fee, will pay class members $11.5M+ and stop the practice in California  —  Tinder last week settled a class action lawsuit for $17.3 million over charging users 30 and older double the standard fee for one of its subscription services.
Jessica Guynn / USA Today:
How black women founders, long underestimated and overlooked in tech, are now raising millions in venture capital and forcing Silicon Valley to pay attention  —  SAN FRANCISCO - In the early days of Zume Pizza, visitors to Julia Collins' robotic food prep company in Silicon Valley …
Alexis C. Madrigal / The Atlantic:
How resellers are making money from Amazon returns via liquidation sites, like Liquidity Services, which has 3M+ users and generated $626.4M in sales last year  —  With a couple hundred dollars and a few minutes, you could go to a liquidation website right now and buy a pallet full of stuff that people have returned to Amazon.
Aaron Pressman / Fortune:
Swarm raises $25M Series A for a constellation of sandwich-sized satellites to provide slow, low-cost connectivity suitable for emergency messaging services  —  As a child, Sara Spangelo dreamed of being an astronaut, attended space camp, and even made it to the final 32 candidates …

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