Techmeme
November 20, 2019, 4:10 PM

Top News

New York Times:
Google has hired IRI Consultants, an anti-union consulting company, in a sign the feud between Google and some activist employees has escalated  —  After nearly two years of unrest, the company appears to be cracking down on employee activism.  —  Google has hired an anti-union consulting firm …
Nathaniel Popper / New York Times:
On-demand transcription service Rev faces backlash from its contractors after cutting their take to 30 cents for each dollar spent on some jobs, from 45 cents  —  Rev was just a small start-up offering online transcriptions.  Now it's the latest symbol of a gig-economy company whose workers are fed up.
Joel Marcey / Facebook Developers:
Facebook details how it's moving from Nuclide to Visual Studio Code for its internal default development environment and contributing remote development tools  —  History  —  Facebook engineers have written millions of lines of code.  There is no mandated development environment.  Some developers use vim.
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Researchers find bugs in Google and Samsung camera apps from before July 2019 that could record video, take pictures, and extract GPS data without permission  —  A new vulnerability has been found in the Camera apps for millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Android devices that could allow …
Ben Lovejoy / 9to5Mac:
Apple says it has begun construction of its $1B Austin, Texas campus, opening in 2022, as Trump is scheduled to tour the nearby Mac Pro production plant  —  Apple has announced that it has begun construction of its new Austin, Texas, campus, on the day that President Trump is due to tour …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Google launches Google Earth tools that let users create and present virtual tours, with attached text, images, and videos, for specific places  —  It's like a homemade guided tour  —  Today, Google is adding new tools to Google Earth on the web that let you build your own tour of a place right on top of the Google Earth map.
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Apple launches Apple Music for Business, letting businesses play music in retail locations with Apple providing human-curated playlists and recommendations  —  Apple Music is now partnering with businesses to play music at retail stores.  In a partnership with PlayNetwork …
Bloomberg:
Alibaba has raised ~$11.2B in its Hong Kong share sale, after pricing 500M new shares at HK$176, in one of the largest equity offerings this year  —  - Company priced 500 million new shares at HK$176 each  — Alibaba's share sale is among the world's largest this year
Jane Zhang / South China Morning Post:
A profile of Baidu Bake, an encyclopedia with 16 times more Chinese entries than Wikipedia, written by 6.9M+ users comprising about 340 core contributors  —  Sign in/up  —  Channels  —  SCMP Editorials  —  Harry's View  —  SCMP  —  Channels  —  Economics  —  Lifestyle & Culture
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Starburst, which is seeking to modernize data analytics with the open source Presto distributed query engine, raises $22M led by Index Ventures  —  Starburst, the company that's looking to monetize the open-source Presto distributed query engine, today announced that it has raised …
More: Business WireThanks:@andreesa
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Uber says user data requests in 2019 from the US and Canada rose 27% YoY, with 3,825 US requests for 21,913 user accounts; Uber shared data 72% of the time  —  Uber says the number of legal demands for riders' data made by U.S. and Canadian authorities has risen sharply in the past year.
More: PYMNTS.com
Brad Templeton / Forbes:
NTSB finds Uber's safety driver the primary cause of fatal Tempe crash, also blames lack of “safety culture” at Uber; AI not detecting jaywalkers played no role  —  The National Transportation Safety Board presented its findings today on the fatal crash involving an Uber test robocar and Elaine Herzberg.
Dr. Ian Cutress / AnandTech:
Q&A with Intel SVP and Chief Architect Raja Koduri on upcoming chips, the company's Xe architecture, and an all-encompassing SDK for Intel's stack called oneAPI  —  Ever since Raja Koduri left AMD and joined Intel, I have been continuously asking for a 1-on-1 interview, as I'm sure a number of my peers in the industry have also.
Thanks:@anandtech
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Gravitational raises $25M Series A, led by Kleiner Perkins, to help developers with cloud deployment using Kubernetes  —  As we move into an increasingly multi-cloud world, there is a portability problem moving applications between clouds.  Gravitational wants to fix that, and today it announced a $25 million Series A.

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Zoho:
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Earlier Picks

Drew Harwell / Washington Post:
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Jordan Novet / CNBC: