Techmeme
August 26, 2016, 6:25 PM

Top News

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
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 …
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:
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.
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.
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Facebook open sources three computer vision tools that can identify objects within photos: DeepMask, SharpMask, and MultiPathNet  —  DeepMask and SharpMask are now open source  —  Facebook is open sourcing a set of computer vision software tools that can identify both the variety and the shape of objects within photos.
Mark Bergen / Recode:
Report: Google Fiber chief Craig Barratt was told by Larry Page to halve staff to 500; Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat interceded to defend business model  —  Another bump in the road for Alphabet.  —  For the past year, Ruth Porat, the CFO of Google and its parent Alphabet, has told Wall Street …
Jordan Kahn / 9to5Mac:
China Labor Watch accuses iPhone 7 manufacturer Pegatron of illegally forcing overtime, low wages of $2/hour, urges Apple to invest in improving conditions  —  Industry watchdog China Labor Watch this week published a new report detailing what it says are continued workers' rights violations …
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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