Techmeme
March 2, 2020, 11:25 PM

Top News

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Waymo raises $2.25B from Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, parent-company Alphabet, and others to scale up its autonomous vehicles operations  —  Waymo, the autonomous vehicles division of Google parent company Alphabet, just got a massive capital infusion from a coterie of investors.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Google updates Pixel phones with new Motion Sense gesture controls, emoji, AR effects, car crash detection for its Personal Safety app, photo and video features  —  One of the benefits of owning a Pixel smartphone is that it improves over time as Pixels are first to receive updates that deliver the latest fixes and improvements.
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Report: senior management at Apple rebuffed some operations execs' suggestion to relocate part of its manufacturing from China to Vietnam as early as 2015  —  Production on Apple's devices has been stymied in recent weeks due to delays caused by the coronavirus outbreak in China.
Jonathan Stempel / Reuters:
Apple agrees to pay up to $500M to settle a US class-action lawsuit accusing it of quietly slowing down older iPhones  —  (Reuters) - Apple Inc (AAPL.O) has agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle litigation accusing it of quietly slowing down older iPhones as it launched new models …
Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
Behind Facebook's rewrite of Messenger, going live today, that has shrunk the iOS app's size from 130MB to 30MB and its codebase from 1.7M to 360K lines of code  —  To make its iPhone messaging app run better—especially on older phones—Facebook rewrote it from the ground up.  The new version is going live now.
Hartley Charlton / MacRumors:
Report: Apple and its suppliers are among the 83 big companies benefitting from China's abusive labor transfer programs for Uyghur Muslims and other minorities  —  A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think-tank has named Apple among 83 other major companies benefiting …
Bloomberg:
Robinhood says it has been experiencing a “system-wide outage” today that it is affecting “all functionalities” on the platform  —  - Issue has been identified and fix is under way, company says  — Some customers of online broker couldn't access their accounts
Chris Welch / The Verge:
AT&T TV launches across the US after rolling out in over a dozen markets last year, with prices that start at $49.99/month but go up dramatically after a year  —  AT&T's next big TV play has a problem: pricing  —  AT&T TV is launching nationwide today after initially rolling out to over a dozen markets last year.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
US sanctions two Chinese nationals for allegedly laundering cryptocurrency for North Korea's Lazarus Group, which has hacked two crypto exchanges since 2018  —  Two Chinese men laundered funds from two hacked cryptocurrency exchanges.  —  The US Treasury Department imposed sanctions today …
About Facebook:
Facebook to begin publishing a monthly report on coordinated inauthentic behavior, says it took down 467 Facebook accounts and 1,245 Instagram accounts in Feb.  —  We're constantly working to find and stop coordinated campaigns that seek to manipulate public debate across our apps.
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Verge survey of 1,123 US adults: 72% said Facebook has too much power; 51% said Google and YouTube should be split up into separate companies  —  Ahead of the election year, we polled Americans about which big tech companies they trust with their personal information …
Financial Times:
Analysis: one-third of donations from employees at big tech firms went to Sens. Warren and Sanders, despite a lack of enthusiasm from tech executives  —  Progressive Democratic candidates receive most cash from tech workers ahead of Super Tuesday  —  Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders …
Jack Nicas / New York Times:
Study: YouTube has reduced recommendations of some conspiracy theories like flat earth and QAnon but has let others flourish for topics like climate change  —  A new study examines YouTube's efforts to limit the spread of conspiracy theories on its site, from videos claiming the end times are near to those questioning climate change.
Olivia Carville / Bloomberg:
Sources: Airbnb's long-planned IPO, previously scheduled for March or April, has been derailed by the coronavirus fallout and could be pushed back to 2021  —  - Startup was targeting first half to kick off the process  — Shares of rivals dive as travel bookings canceled globally
Mike Isaac / New York Times:

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