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.

Sponsor Posts

Meta:
Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few  —  Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.
Zoho:
Introducing AI Forms: Create optimized forms with AI in Zoho Forms  —  The future of form creation isn't coming, it's here.  Forget everything you thought you knew about building online forms.
Genesys:
Executive Insights: The Era of Contact Center AI Copilots  —  How AI copilots are transforming customer experience and agent performance.
Tribe AI:
Build AI products that matter  —  Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact.  We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Fri. 12/20 - Gemini Flash Thinking
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:10 PM ET, November 20, 2019.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

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