Techmeme
August 27, 2019, 2:00 PM

Top News

Mike Isaac / New York Times:
US government charges Anthony Levandowski, a former star engineer at Google and Uber, with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of Google trade secrets  —  SAN JOSE, Calif. — Anthony Levandowski, one of Silicon Valley's foremost technologists on self-driving cars, was charged …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft announces Surface event on October 2 in New York City  —  We might see a new dual-screen Surface  —  Microsoft is holding a special Surface hardware event in New York City in October.  The event, which will be held on October 2nd, could serve as the first unveiling of Microsoft's dual-screen Surface device.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
Fairphone debuts Fairphone 3, its ethical, repairable smartphone made of responsibly sourced, recyclable materials, available from September 3 for €450  —  Featuring a repairable design made of fairly sourced, recyclable materials  —  Three years after the release of its last handset …
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Sources: Facebook is testing Threads, a messaging app for Instagram that lets users automatically share status, location, battery life, more with Close Friends  —  The app promotes sharing your status, location, and more with your closest friends  —  Facebook is developing …
Geoffrey A. Fowler / Washington Post:
Deep dive on the byzantine tracking and analytics industry around credit card purchases and steps that consumers can take to improve their privacy  —  In a privacy experiment, we bought one banana with the new Apple Card — and another with the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa from Chase.
Jalopnik:
Data from 14,756 fares: Uber and Lyft have slashed driver pay in recent years by taking a larger portion of each fare, far more than they publicly report  —  In July, an Uber driver we'll call Dave—his name has been changed here to protect his identity—picked up a fare in a trendy neighborhood of a major U.S. metropolitan area.
Jim Waterson / The Guardian:
BBC says it will launch a voice assistant called Beeb next year, that will understand British accents and be built into its website and iPlayer app on smart TVs  —  Corporation recording voices of staff across UK to help Beeb software understand accents  —  The BBC is preparing to launch …
Bernie Sanders / Columbia Journalism Review:
Bernie Sanders pledges to protect news orgs from tech monopolies if elected, including stronger antitrust enforcement, taxing targeted ads to fund public media  —  Walter Cronkite once said that “journalism is what we need to make democracy work.”  He was absolutely right …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
E-commerce startup Enjoy, led by ex-Apple VP of retail operations Ron Johnson, raises $150M Series C to fuel its UK expansion, has now raised $350M to date  —  Enjoy, the e-commerce startup led by former Apple VP of retail operations, Ron Johnson, has raised an additional $150 million …
Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
Source: judge rules Craig Wright must turn over half of his bitcoin holdings and IP from before 2014 to the estate of Dave Kleiman in $10B lawsuit filed in 2018  —  Craig Wright must turn over half of his bitcoin holdings and intellectual property to the estate of Dave Kleiman, a judge ruled Monday.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Sensor Tower: daily US downloads required to reach No. 1 on the App Store Top Charts for non-game apps is 94K, down ~30% since 2016, but 174K for games, up ~47%  —  With the App Store's big makeover in fall 2017, Apple attempted to shift consumers' attention away from the Top Charts and more toward editorial content.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Researchers at Alphabet's DeepMind detail OpenSpiel, a collection of AI training tools for video games, now available on Github  —  Reinforcement learning, the AI training technique that's brought to fruition systems capable of defeating world poker champions and guiding self-driving cars …
More: GitHub

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