Techmeme
February 7, 2020, 7:40 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: the Trump admin has bought access to a database tracking locations of millions of phones in the US and is using it for immigration and border control  —  Commercial database that maps movements of millions of cellphones is deployed by immigration and border authorities
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 may end up raising less than half of the planned $108B, with nearly all of its capital coming from SoftBank itself  —  The new pool could end up being less than half its planned size, with nearly all of its capital coming from SoftBank itself
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Instagram has internally prototyped an Instagram Partner Program that will let IGTV creators earn money by inserting ads in their videos  —  Instagram may finally let IGTV video makers earn money 18 months after launching the longer-form content hub.  Instagram confirms to TechCrunch …
New York Times:
The number of reported videos related to online child sex abuse reached 41M in 2019, surpassing the number of reported photos; Facebook found 85% of the total  —  In a first, videos outnumbered photos in reports to the authorities last year.  Facebook found the most imagery, the bulk of it on its Messenger app.
Reuters:
Coronavirus exposes China's surveillance state as apps show locations of the infected, cameras detect people with fevers and identify them even with masks, more  —  BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) - When the man from Hangzhou returned home from a business trip, the local police got in touch.
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Paystand, which is building a blockchain-based platform to make B2B transactions as easy as Venmo payments are for consumers, raises $20M Series B  —  Paystand has raised $20 million to modernize commercial payments using its blockchain-based platform so that paying a corporate bill is as easy …
AnandTech:
64-core AMD Threadripper 3990X CPU review: great for rendering and scientific computing but has the same performance as AMD's 32-core CPU for other applications  —  The recent renaissance of AMD as the performance choice in the high-end x86 market has been great for consumers, enabling a second offering at the top-end of the market.
Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
Facebook says it has received 15K bug reports in 2019, awarded about $2.2M in bounties for 1,300 of them, up from ~$1.1M for 700 bugs in 2018  —  A few months ago, Facebook disclosed that apps were siphoning data from up to 9.5 million of its users.  They only found out thanks to a bug bounty submission.
CNBC:
Uber's stock is up ~10% after the company announced a Q4 loss that was narrower than expected and moved its profitability forecast forward  —  - Uber's revenue growth picked up in the quarter.  — During the fourth quarter, Uber faced tighter regulations impacting its business in London and California and continued to slash costs.
Uber:

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More News

Theodore Schleifer / Vox:
Mark Harris / TechCrunch:
Joe DeBlasio / Google Online Security Blog:

Earlier Picks

Reuters:
Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch:
Nick Statt / The Verge:
David Kirton / Reuters:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: