Techmeme
August 27, 2016, 11:05 AM

Top News

Facebook Newsroom:
Facebook will now select stories and excerpts automatically for Trending topic pages, show topics instead of story descriptions in Trending section  —  Today, we're making some changes to the Trending feature on Facebook that will make the product more automated and will no longer require people …
Quartz:
Sources: Facebook letting go of entire Trending Topics editorial staff, consisting of 15-18 workers contracted through a third party  —  Facebook will no longer employ humans to write descriptions for items in its Trending section, which attracted controversy over allegations of political bias in May.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Spotify retaliates against artists who give exclusives to rivals by excluding tracks from promoted playlists and demoting their songs in search results  —  Service said to tell labels it may keep tracks off playlists  —  Apple Music emerges as largest challenge to streaming leader
Ina Fried / Recode:
White House proposing new federal rules letting foreign entrepreneurs with $345K+ in US funding remain in country for 5 years; no congressional approval needed  —  The move, which won't require congressional approval, allows people to stay up to five years, provided their startup has significant U.S. investment.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple to use Sony's FeliCa chip, a mobile tap-to-pay standard, in new iPhones in Japan to let users pay for transit with their smartphones  —  Company planning new iPhone model with Sony's FeliCa chip  —  Apple in talks with financial insitution for mobile payments
Akin Oyedele / Business Insider:
PE firm Apollo Global taking Rackspace private in $4.3B deal, valuing firm at 38% premium over August 3 closing price when first reports about buyout surfaced  —  Apollo Global, a private-equity firm, has agreed to buy Rackspace in a $4.3 billion deal that would take the cloud-computing company private.
The Citizen Lab:
How a government targeted Ahmed Mansoor, an activist in the UAE, with three zero-day exploits meant to infect his iPhone with sophisticated commercial spyware  —  Ahmed Mansoor is an internationally recognized human rights defender, based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) …
Andrea Peterson / Washington Post:
Sarah Frier / Bloomberg:
Sources: Twitter is working on an anti-harassment tool to let users filter posts using keywords  —  Abuse has led to depature of several high-profile users  —  New solution is similar to Instagram's keyword-based filter  —  Twitter Inc. is working on a keyword-based tool that will let people filter …
Matthew Lynley / TechCrunch:
Dropbox prompting users to reset passwords that haven't been changed since mid-2012, calls it a preventative move, says no evidence accounts improperly accessed  —  Dropbox is requiring users who have not changed their passwords since mid-2012 to reset their passwords this afternoon.
Jack Marshall / Wall Street Journal:
PitchBook: VCs invested $1.2B+ in marketing tech, compared to around $860M in ad tech firms in 2015, betting on a more predictable revenue model  —  The distinction between the two sectors is increasingly blurring, but investors say a predictable revenue model is key
New York Times:
WhatsApp to share phone numbers and analytics data of users with Facebook, two years after it said it had no plans to collect data  —  SAN FRANCISCO — When Facebook bought the start-up WhatsApp in 2014, Jan Koum, one of WhatsApp's founders, declared that the deal would not affect …

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Earlier Picks

Mark Bergen / Recode: