Techmeme
January 7, 2020, 9:15 PM

Top News

New York Times:
Sonos sues Google, seeking financial damages and a ban on the sale of Google's speakers, smartphones, and laptops in US for allegedly infringing on five patents  —  The maker of home speakers said Google and Amazon stole its technology and abused their power, but it could only risk suing one.
New York Times:
Andrew Bosworth / Facebook:
Andrew Bosworth publicly releases his internal post on Facebook's role in 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica, polarization, algorithmic transparency, and more  —  The NYT recently obtained a copy of a post I made to the wall of my internal profile within Facebook.
Khari Johnson / VentureBeat:
Google says Assistant now has 500M users and announces upcoming features: Scheduled Actions, privacy-focused voice controls, longform reading, and Sticky Notes  —  Google Assistant is now used by 500 million monthly active users, and today Google is previewing features on the way in 2020 …
Natasha Mascarenhas / Crunchbase News:
Report: pizza-making robot startup Zume, which raised $375M from SoftBank Vision Fund in 2018, plans to lay off up to 400 staff, or about 80% of its employees  —  In a little over a year, pizza-making robot startup Zume has gone from getting $375 million from SoftBank, to pivoting …
Anna Baydakova / CoinDesk:
Telegram says it will not integrate TON Blockchain and a Gram cryptocurrency wallet into its messenger app for now  —  Telegram will not integrate a crypto wallet into its messaging app, at least until it gets the green light from U.S. regulators, the company said Monday on its official website.
Monika Bickert / About Facebook:
Facebook says it is tightening its policies around misleading manipulated media by banning videos that are either heavily edited or deepfakes  —  People share millions of photos and videos on Facebook every day, creating some of the most compelling and creative visuals on our platform.
Washington Post:
Facebook bans deepfakes, but its new policy may not cover simpler forms of deception like with the distorted Pelosi video  —  Facebook has banned users from posting computer-generated, highly manipulated videos, known as deepfakes, seeking to stop the spread of a novel form of misinformation months …
Cory Weinberg / The Information:
Sources: Softbank-backed car-rental startup Getaround plans to lay off ~150 employees, or about a quarter of its staff, to mitigate rising costs  —  Car-rental startup Getaround plans to lay off roughly 150 employees, or about a quarter of its staff, in a bid to reduce rising costs, people familiar with the matter said.
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
A look at Intel's NUC 9 Extreme modular desktop, building on previous efforts by combining a compact design with upgradeable parts, coming in March for $1,050+  —  It might change the way mini-PCs are built  —  Today, you can upgrade a desktop PC's gaming performance just by plugging in a new graphics card.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Uber open sources Manifold, a visual tool for debugging AI models that is used in analyzing Uber's Michelangelo ML platform  —  Debugging machine learning (ML) models isn't a walk in the woods.  Just ask the data scientists and engineers at Uber, some of whom have the unenviable task …

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