Techmeme
July 16, 2019, 3:20 PM

Top News

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Highlights from the Senate hearing with Facebook's David Marcus on the proposed Libra cryptocurrency, and what was left unanswered  —  Facebook will only build its own Calibra cryptocurrency wallet into Messenger and Whatsapp, and will refuse to embed competing wallets …
Bloomberg:
Tony Romm / Washington Post:
Trump threatens to “take a look” at Google for alleged China ties, in a tweet that cited claims Peter Thiel made at a conference and repeated on Fox News  —  President Trump on Tuesday appeared to threaten that his administration would “take a look” at Google …
Bloomberg:
Meredith Whittaker, who helped lead employee protests at Google over its military and AI work, and sexual harassment policies, is leaving the company  —  Meredith Whittaker, who helped lead employee protests at Google over the search giant's military work, artificial intelligence and policies, is leaving the company.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple plans to fund original, exclusive podcasts and has reached out to media companies, in a bid to compete with Spotify  —  - Tech giant looks to use exclusives to compete with Spotify  — Company has recently added new Podcasts Mac app, web interface
VICE:
Inside a lawsuit against Girls Do Porn, one of Pornhub's popular channels, which 22 women allege post videos without proper consent, leading to doxxing and more  —  Pornhub is hosting videos that have been viewed hundreds of millions of times.  The women in them say they thought the videos …
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News:
Press Association:
Facebook introduces a scam ads reporting tool in the UK and donates £3M to Citizens Advice for Scams Action, a dedicated online anti-scam service  —  Social media firm to investigate users' complaints and take down violating posts  —  Fresh efforts to tackle scam adverts across Facebook …
Robert Lee Hotz / Wall Street Journal:
A look at the Apollo 11's guidance computer, the first digital general-purpose, multitasking, interactive portable computer, with about 145K lines of code  —  The moon landing was one of the most important moments in the history of computing, laying the foundations of much of our digital world
Jeff Stone / CyberScoop:
Ukrainian hacker Mikhail Rytikov, sought by the US since 2013 for running a dark web network used by criminals at scale, arrested in Ukraine with US and UK help  —  Ukrainian police have arrested an accused cybercriminal who allegedly facilitated a web hosting scheme that made it possible …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Sprint says hackers had access to customers' names, billing, device details, and more via Samsung's website, fails to disclose the number affected  —  Hackers had access to customer info such as names, billing, device details, and more.  —  US mobile network operator Sprint said hackers broke …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Facebook makes its first changes to Workplace pricing, raising the premium tier by $1/person/month and introducing a new $8 Workplace Enterprise tier  —  Three years into its life with 2 million paying users signed up, Workplace — Facebook's platform for businesses and and other organizations …
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Uber open sources Plato, a tool for developing and testing conversational AI across many deep learning frameworks including TensorFlow and PyTorch  —  Designing conversational AI isn't as Sysiphean as it sounds.  Tools like Google's Dialogflow, Microsoft's Bot Framework …
Isabelle Kirkwood / BetaKit:
Montréal-based startup Landr, which develops AI-powered audio mastering software, raises ~$20M Series B from Sony Innovation Fund, Warner Music, others  —  Landr, an AI-powered audio mastering software startup based in Montréal, has raised a $26 million Series B. Sony Innovation Fund …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
In the next Windows 10 update, expected to arrive in September, Microsoft will allow voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa to activate on the lock screen  —  New changes coming later this year  —  Microsoft is opening up Windows 10 even further to third-party digital assistants.

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Earlier Picks

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