Techmeme
August 4, 2019, 7:35 PM

Top News

Robert Evans / bellingcat:
El Paso, the third mass shooting announced on 8chan, shows how its /pol/ board deliberately radicalizes users into mass shooters and gamifies massacring people  —  On August 3, 2019, at around 11am local time, initial police reports indicated that a gunman had walked into an El Paso Wal-Mart and opened fire.
Ryan Broderick / BuzzFeed News:
If 8chan vanished, its users would likely just flock to a new copycat site, like how 4chan users switched to 8chan amid increased moderation during Gamergate  —  “If 8chan is shutdown here is what will happen: someone else will spin up a new imageboard, say 20chan or whatever.  People will flock to that."
Maddy Myers / Kotaku:
E3 website leaks personal info, including addresses and phone numbers, of 2,000+ reporters and content creators; E3 has removed file but data still circulates  —  A spreadsheet containing the contact information and personal addresses of over 2,000 games journalists, editors …
Karen Hao / MIT Technology Review:
A look at edtech startups like Squirrel AI that are using AI to personalize learning in China, where fierce academic competition is driving an AI education boom  —  In recent years, the country has rushed to pursue “intelligent education.”  Now its billion-dollar ed-tech companies are planning to export their vision overseas.
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Data breach seller says sneaker marketplace StockX was hacked in May and 6.8M records with contact info and hashed passwords were taken; StockX confirms hack  —  It wasn't “system updates” as it claimed.  StockX was mopping up after a data breach, TechCrunch can confirm.
Taylor Hatmaker / The Daily Beast:
Palmer Luckey's Anduril is expanding work with CBP, which buys Anduril's surveillance tech to use along Mexico's border and is testing it near Canada's border  —  With a high-tech spin on building the wall, Anduril is expanding its border surveillance ambitions—and picking up work that some tech companies aren't willing to touch.
Tweets: @ethank
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Report: out of 188,620 extensions available on the Chrome Web Store, ~50% have fewer than 16 installs and 87% have fewer than 1,000; only 13 have 10M+ users  —  Around 87% of all Google Chrome extensions have fewer than 1,000 installs.  —  There are 188,620 extensions available on the Chrome Web Store …
Alex Wilhelm / Crunchbase News:
WeWork has acquired at least six software companies related to real estate, possibly to build a software stack that it can sell to other real estate companies  —  This week WeWork, also known as The We Company and best known for its global coworking business, is adding another software company to its portfolio of acquisitions.
Sharon Terlep / Wall Street Journal:
How companies use AI in customer service: some to serve clients better, and some to find the “breakpoint” at which their service is so bad that a customer quits  —  Technology lets companies see how badly they can treat consumers, right up until the moment they bolt

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Earlier Picks

Ben Riley-Smith / Telegraph:
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Matt Day / Bloomberg:
Nick Statt / The Verge: