Techmeme
December 17, 2019, 8:40 PM

Top News

Daniel Cooper / Engadget:
Googler says she was fired for sending pop-ups on labor rights via modified internal browser plugin; Google: she “abused privileged access” in altering the tool  —  Google stands accused of firing a fifth employee who was suspected of attempting to organize a labor union at the search giant.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources describe Peter Thiel's expanding influence at Facebook, where he advises Zuckerberg on White House dynamics and holding firm on the political ads policy  —  Billionaire investor thinks political-ad policy shouldn't change; some directors and executives disagree
Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed News:
Ex-Facebook staffers on how Facebook's focus on growth metrics in performance reviews prodded staff to game the system and ignore other impacts of their work  —  Facebook often uses its vast size as an excuse for its failures.  Meanwhile, it's ordering employees to make it bigger.
iFixit News:
Mac Pro needs little to no tooling for basic fixes and upgrades, scores a 9/10 on repairability; components are modular but some are proprietary, like SSD cards  —  Teardown of the reinvented 2019 Mac Pro, which returns to a properly repairable design that happens to not grate cheese very well.
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Facebook pilots a program in the US to use part-time contracted “community reviewers” to expedite the fact-checking process and aid its fact-checking partners  —  Facebook is creating a new pilot program in the U.S. that will leverage part-time contracted “community reviewers” to expedite its fact-checking process.
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
The Information:
Sources: early last year, Alphabet and Google's leadership set a timeline for its cloud group to best its rivals by 2023, and considered leaving the market  —  Google's cloud unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon …
Joseph Cox / VICE:
Ring device testing shows it lacks safeguards that would deter credential stuffing and brute force attacks, making 2FA a key part of securing accounts  —  It's not so much being watched.  It's that I don't really know if I'm being watched or not.  —  From across the other side of the world …
Bret Kinsella / Voicebot.ai:
Report: Amazon had revenue of $1.4M from Alexa's in-skill purchases in the first ten months of 2019, which was well short of its target of $5.5M  —  The Information published (N.B. paywall) an article this morning saying that Amazon earned $1.4 million Alexa skill revenue through the first 10 months …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
After a cyber attack, Canadian medical lab LifeLabs paid a ransom to recover the stolen data of 15M+ customers, which included login info and test results  —  Data breach took place in early November, and hackers also gained access to 85,000 laboratory test results.
Andrew Higgins / New York Times:
After a massive outcry over the police raid on Nginx Moscow offices, Rambler's board orders company execs to ask law enforcement to terminate the criminal case  —  A case linked to a $670 million acquisition shows that there may be a limit to the authorities' abuse of law enforcement to advance corrupt business interests.
Danny Palmer / ZDNet:
WhatsApp fixes bug that allowed a rogue group member to render the app unusable, forcing a reinstall and loss of group chat content  —  Researchers detail security flaw that allowed hackers to crash WhatsApp and permanently delete contents of group chats - and urge users to update the app to protect against attacks.
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Facebook is funding a free 45-minute online Reuters course for journalists on spotting and handling manipulated media, now in English, French, Spanish, Arabic  —  Facebook is spending six figures to fund a course on manipulated media and deepfakes for newsrooms, executives tell Axios.
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Alchemy, which is building middleware that connects Dapps to underlying blockchains like Ethereum, raises $15M from Pantera, Stanford, Coinbase, and others  —  Meet the $15M-funded Microsoft of cryptocurrency  —  The top cryptocurrency companies have quietly begun to outsource their infrastructure problems to a tiny stealth startup.
Luke Jones / WinBuzzer:
Microsoft opens the Microsoft Edge Addons store for submissions ahead of Chromium-based Edge launch  —  Developers can now submit to the Microsoft Edge Addons Store, with existing Chromium extensions migrated automatically.  —  Microsoft has today announced the Microsoft Edge Addons store is now fully open.
Paul Ziobro / Wall Street Journal:
Amazon blocks marketplace sellers from using FedEx Ground for Prime shipments indefinitely over FedEx's “delivery performance”  —  Amazon cites a decline in FedEx performance heading into the final holiday push  —  Amazon.com Inc. AMZN .47% is blocking its third-party sellers …
Spencer Soper / Bloomberg:

Sponsor Posts

Airtable:
Meet Airtable ProductCentral  —  The unified solution for managing your entire product development process in the AI era.
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.
Zoho:
Zoho Forms for successful Black Friday sales  —  Black Friday is a retail frenzy that can significantly impact your bottom line.  To make the most of this shopping bonanza, you need a strategy that not only attracts customers …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Mon. 11/04 - Apple Buying And Investing In Things
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 8:40 PM ET, December 17, 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

Adithya Venkatraman / App Annie:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Karl Freund / Forbes: