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Techmeme
December 29, 2019, 10:25 AM

Top News

Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
IoT device vendor Wyze says a server leak exposed data, including email addresses, camera user IDs, and WiFi SSIDs, of ~2.4M customers from Dec. 4 to Dec. 26  —  Details for 2.4 million users were exposed online for 22 days.  —  Wyze, a company that sells smart devices like security cameras …
Sarah J. Jackson / New York Times:
In 2010s, Twitter enabled young and marginalized people to be heard, held news organizations accountable, and pushed largely ignored issues into the mainstream  —  It's impossible to avoid news about how harmful social media can be.  The Cambridge Analytica scandal.  The ubiquitous Russian bots.
Uri Berkovitz / Globes Online:
In 2019, nine Israeli startups became unicorns, bringing the total unicorns in the country to 20, and 16 startups completed a financing round of $100M or more  —  Israel now has 20 unicorns, privately-held tech companies worth more than $1 billion.  Only the US, China and UK have more unicorns.
Gené Teare / Crunchbase News:
Analysis: 142 startups, including 78 from the US and 22 from China, became unicorns in 2019, down from 158 in 2018; unicorns raised $85.1B vs. $139B in 2018  —  In 2019, unicorns were far from mythical and Crunchbase followed them every step of the way.  This year (as of Dec. 25, 2019) …
Nicholas Vinocur / Politico:
Since GDPR became law in May 2018, the only substantial privacy-related action against a major tech company happened in the US, where Facebook was fined $5B  —  The world's toughest privacy law proves toothless in the eyes of many critics.  —  More than 18 months after the European Union began implementing …
Yahoo News:
Internal Pentagon memo warns service members against using consumer DNA testing kits from 23andMe and others, citing security risks  —  WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is advising members of the military not to use consumer DNA kits, saying the information collected by private companies could pose …
Mark Ledwich:
A new study finds that YouTube's late 2019 algorithm actively discourages users from watching radicalizing content, directing them to more mainstream videos  —  In 2018, Kevin Roose published a piece in the New York Times in which Caleb Cain, a liberal college dropout, described his experience …
Karen Hao / MIT Technology Review:
How a difference between Chinese and English languages helped Baidu make an important advancement in natural language processing  —  Inspired by a difference between Chinese and English, it shows how AI research benefits from diversity.  —  MS Tech / Source: Unsplash
More: Quartz
Constance Grady / Vox:
With print books often cheaper than ebooks, whose sales stabilized at ~20% of total book sales, a look at the aftermath of Apple's ebook price fixing lawsuit  —  Publishing spent the 2010s fighting tooth and nail against ebooks.  There were unintended consequences.

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More News

Jay Mazoomdaar / The Indian Express:

Earlier Picks

David Porter / 8tracks blog:
Jasper Jolly / The Guardian: