Techmeme
February 18, 2016, 10:25 AM

Top News

Jordan Novet / VentureBeat:
Google CEO Sundar Pichai tweets in support of Apple, says forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise user privacy  —  Google CEO Sundar Pichai backs Tim Cook over Apple-FBI controversy  —  Google CEO Sundar Pichai just weighed in on the ongoing issue over device encryption between Apple …
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
White House Plays With Words, Says Department Of Justice Isn't Asking Apple To Create A Backdoor  —  Following Tim Cook's letter, the White House has reacted to Apple's strong stance against backdoors.  According to Reuters, the White House has said that the Department of Justice isn't asking …
Elise Viebeck / Washington Post:
Tim Cook / Apple:
Skype Blogs:
Skype starts rolling out group video calling for iOS and Android, beginning with North America and Western Europe today, with worldwide availability in March  —  Announcing group video calling for mobile phones and tablets  —  Just a few weeks ago, we announced the next evolution of Skype …
Bloomberg Business:
Apple Pay launches in China, will use UnionPay's point-of-sale network for off-line payments  —  Apple Joins With China's UnionPay to Introduce Mobile Payments  —  Clients of 19 Chinese lenders can shop with Apple Pay  —  Alipay and Tencent dominate China's online payment market
Bloomberg Business:
Profile of Johny Srouji, Apple's SVP for hardware technologies, who is leading the development of company's chips  —  The Most Important Apple Executive You've Never Heard Of  —  A visit with Cupertino's chief chipmaker, Johny Srouji.  —  A little over a year ago, Apple had a problem: The iPad Pro was behind schedule.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft rolls out updates for Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 that address power management bugs and Intel driver issues  —  Microsoft's new Surface Book update will fix sleep problems  —  When we reviewed Microsoft's Surface Book back in October we noticed a number of weird issues.
Ben Popper / The Verge:
Neverware updates CloudReady, a modified version of Chromium with dual-booting capability for Macs and PCs  —  How to turn your sluggish old Mac or PC into a faster Chromebook  —  Earlier today we published a story about Neverware, a New York City startup that is helping schools refurbish old Windows PCs …
Diego Macias / Android Headlines:
Google Translate adds 13 new languages bringing total to 103, now serves 99% of online population  —  Google Translate Update Adds New Language Support  —  Google Translate is a very powerful and useful tool which has been getting better over time.  The service can be used to translate text …
Richard Winton / Los Angeles Times:
Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center paid $17K ransom in bitcoins to hackers who took over its network for more than a week  —  Hollywood hospital pays $17,000 in bitcoins to hackers who took control of computers  —  The Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in 2004.
Reuters:
Uber CEO says firm loses $1B+ a year in China due to price war with unprofitable competitor  —  Uber losing $1 billion a year to compete in China  —  Uber Technologies Inc is burning through more than a billion dollars a year in China as it wages a fierce price war against local rival Didi Kuaidi, its chief executive said.
Jon Russell / TechCrunch:
Google Acquihires Work Chat Startup Pie To Build Engineering Team In Southeast Asia  —  Google today announced that it is building its first engineering team devoted to Southeast Asia, and the search giant has gobbled up Pie, a Slack-like team communications service based in Singapore, to kick start things.
Kara Swisher / Re/code:
Yahoo Tech Editor in Chief Dan Tynan is out; Yahoo's tech site will be integrated into its larger news site; David Pogue will stay with the company  —  If It's Wednesday, It's Layoffs Day at Yahoo: Today, Digital Magazines Get Hit  —  According to sources close to the situation …
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Twitter will now let you record and share videos in Direct Messages  —  Twitter may be in the middle of an existential crisis of sorts over where to take its slow-growing social network, but the company keeps plugging away at basic features to bring the service up to speed with competitors like Facebook Messenger.

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