|
December 17, 2019, 11:55 PM
|
Mediagazer
memeorandum
WeSmirchTop 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.
More:
Kathryn Spiers, NBC News, The Guardian, The Guardian, SiliconANGLE, Bloomberg, The Verge, Forbes, VICE, Boing Boing, Ars Technica, Silicon Valley Business …, Associated Press, OneZero, Input, Mercury News, Telegraph, GamesIndustry.biz, CNET, KnowTechie, Axios, The Daily Dot, TechCrunch, and The Register
| 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.
More:
About Facebook, CNET, and Mashable
Tweets: @sarafischer, @daveyalba, @kevinroose, @mantzarlis, @sarafischer, @adamberinsky, @shiraovide, @jgreendc, and @edbott
| Josh Constine / TechCrunch: |
More:
Instagram, Washington Post, Input, Quartz, Geek.com, Inc42 Media, iPhone in Canada Blog, The Mac Observer, Adweek, Mashable, and 9to5Mac
Tweets: @alexeheath, @b52malmet, @blakersdozen, @joshconstine, @joshconstine, and @jasonabbruzzese
| 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
More:
Mashable, Business Insider, Mercury News, CNBC, Seeking Alpha, and CNET
| 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 …
More:
NBC News, Vox, Fight for the Future, Stacey on IoT, and socalTECH.com
| 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.
Tweets: @kantrowitz, @lainnafader, @joshconstine, @_andyburrows, @coryweinberg, @lainnafader, @rmac18, and @buzzfeednews
| 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.
More:
MacRumors, AppleInsider, The Verge, Input, Ars Technica, Cult of Mac, MSPoweruser, The Register, Engadget, SlashGear, MacDailyNews, CNET, AppleInsider, iDownloadBlog.com, iPhone Hacks, Daring Fireball, iPhone in Canada Blog, 9to5Mac, and MacRumors
Tweets: @ifixit, @kkiyer90, @johnbbeta, @whatthebit, @mcwm, @fanlesstech, and @ifixit
| 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.
More:
LifeLabs, IPC, CBC News, Canadian Press, LifeLabs, SiliconANGLE, Mashable, Toronto Sun, CBC News, NEWS 1130, British Columbia, globalnews.ca, CHCH, BleepingComputer, Tofino-Ucluelet Westerly News, and Dark Reading
Tweets: @bp256r1, @lifelabs, @chetwisniewski, @5thestate, @michael_kan, @campuscodi, and @caseykins421
| CNN: |
The Epilepsy Foundation files criminal complaint against 30+ unidentified Twitter users for coordinated attack of seizure-inducing videos to its feed last month — (CNN)Attackers sent videos of flashing and strobing lights to people on Twitter last month as part of a cyberattack which deliberately targeted people with epilepsy.
More:
Epilepsy Foundation, CyberScoop, New York Times, CNET, U.S. Department of Justice, HuffPost, Metro.co.uk, The Independent, New York Post, ZDNet, Threatpost, and CBS San Francisco
Tweets: @nytnational, @davidjoachim, @jtregunna, @cnn, @izusuki, @campuscodi, and @shanvav
| 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 …
More:
CNBC, SiliconANGLE, MSPoweruser, New York Post, and Seeking Alpha
Tweets: @kmclaughlinsf, @mer__edith, @traskjd, @nickwingfield, @willhamill, @jny, @mhbergen, @ryan, @amir, @krishnan, @petebray, @jessicalessin, and @migueldeicaza
| 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.
More:
Ars Technica, Meduza.io, Financial Times, RT, Reuters, and ZDNet
Tweets: @briankrebs, @steipete, and @kevinrothrock
| Chris Prentice / Reuters: |
SEC charges former Palo Alto Networks IT administrator and four accomplices with insider trading from 2015 to 2018; the traders made over $7M in illegal profits — WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. authorities on Tuesday said they have charged a former IT administrator and four friends involved …
| 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.
More:
alchemyapi.io, Bloomberg, Wired, Cointelegraph, SiliconANGLE, and The Block
Tweets: @joshconstine and @veradittakit
| Romain Dillet / TechCrunch: |
Hugging Face, which recently found success with its open-source NLP library after debuting an app that let users chat with an artificial friend, raises $15M — Hugging Face has raised a $15 million funding round led by Lux Capital. The company first built a mobile app that let you chat … | 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 …
Source:
The Information. More:
Variety, Daring Fireball, SiliconANGLE, ZDNet, and Seeking Alpha
Tweets: @bmetrock, @nickbastone, @mcwm, @mcclure111, @zerohedge, @nachkari, @priyasideas, @mattmday, @mathewi, @nickwingfield, @mathewi, @kantrowitz, and @amir
| 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.
More:
Social Media Today, Input, Engadget, and Firstpost Tech
Tweets: @drewharwell, @jbenton, @rvawonk, @oneunderscore__, and @mathewi
| Bloomberg Law: |
NLRB rules that employers can ban workers from using company email for union and other organizing purposes, overturning the Board's ruling from 2014 — Businesses can ban workers from using company email for union and other organizing purposes, the National Labor Relations Board decided in a Dec. 17 decision.
More:
Gizmodo
| Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch: |
Skyryse demos its Skyryse Flight Stack, which enables existing helicopters to be flown autonomously, says it has raised a total of $38M in funding to date — Skyryse is a three-year old transportation startup that is approaching the future of aviation from a different angle when compared to most.| LogMeIn, Inc.: |
LogMeIn to be acquired by affiliates of PE firm Francisco Partners and Elliott Management for $86.05/share in cash, valuing the company at ~$4.3B — All-Cash Transaction Valued at Approximately $4.3 Billion — LogMeIn, Inc. (NASDAQ: LOGM), a leading provider of cloud-based connectivity …
| Nick Statt / The Verge: |
Email cleanup service Unroll.me settles with FTC for misleading users about how it shared users' email data, will have to delete personal info it collected — The settlement forces Unroll.me to delete all the email receipts it collected — Before this year's blockbuster Superhuman scandal … 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.
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:
The crossroads of AI and SaaS — Enabling businesses of all sizes to build products in-house and disqualifying SaaS tools that are not AI-powered. In a span of just two years, AI has made a name for itself as the key driver for innovation.
The crossroads of AI and SaaS — Enabling businesses of all sizes to build products in-house and disqualifying SaaS tools that are not AI-powered. In a span of just two years, AI has made a name for itself as the key driver for innovation.
Genesys:
Executive Insights: The Era of Contact Center AI Copilots — How AI copilots are transforming customer experience and agent performance.
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.
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.Who's Hiring In Tech?
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 11:55 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.
From Mediagazer
New York Times:Max Tani / @maxwelltani:
Jack Dunn / Variety:
Upcoming Tech Events
Earlier Picks
| Adithya Venkatraman / App Annie: |
More:
Social Media Today, Input, Android Headlines, TechSpot, iMore, iPhone Hacks, 9to5Mac, and Gamasutra
Tweets: @marcsettle, @riptari, @tyadkisson, and @sachinrekhi
| Eun-Young Jeong / Wall Street Journal: |
More:
Financial Times, The Verge, Bloomberg, Electronics Weekly, BBC, MSN, TechCrunch, MobileSyrup, CityAM, and Gizmodo
| Spencer Soper / Bloomberg: |
More:
International Business Times, Input, TechCrunch, KnowTechie, The Digital Reader, New York Post, CNBC, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, SlashGear, TechSpot, The Verge, and CNBC
Tweets: @business, @mattmday, @mcwm, @business, @rrpre, @business, @harrymccracken, @yadav_supplychn, @ericnewcomer, @shiraovide, @halsinger, @matthewkeyslive, @oliviabvoz, @wsakaren, and @avajoyewjz
| Luke Jones / WinBuzzer: |
More:
TECHCOMMUNITY.MICROSOFT.COM, TechRadar.com, Microsoft Docs, ZDNet, Windows Blog, OnMSFT.com, Input, AskWoody, Thurrott, The Next Web, Ausdroid, Redmond, Windows Central, and Neowin
Tweets: @glenngabe, @qmatteoq, and @msedgedev
| Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: |
More:
International Business Times, iMore, Geek.com, Business Insider, About Facebook, Thurrott, Social Media Today, SiliconANGLE, Adweek, Firstpost Tech, Pocket-lint, SlashGear, and Wccftech
Tweets: @adibhidayat, @enellaxxx, and @mosseri