Techmeme
October 23, 2018, 2:05 PM

Top News

Nilay Patel / The Verge:
iPhone XR review: competitive price for Apple's latest processor and cameras with a great battery life, but comes in only one size and the display is not great  —  Big screen, small compromise  —  Video by Phil Esposito & Becca Farsace  —  Here's a question: how much do you care about the display on a phone?
Joanna Stern / Wall Street Journal:
iPhone XR review: despite some drawbacks, the XR has a better price, battery, and more colorful design than the XS, making it hard to recommend the XS over XR  —  The iPhone XR has a few price-cutting compromises, but great battery life, Face ID and a colorful design make it the best iPhone to buy
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Apple says iOS 12.1 will fix a bug that resulted in smoother-looking photos taken by the iPhone XS and XR's front camera, thus improving selfie quality  —  Beautygate no longer  —  Ever since the iPhone XS came out, there's been criticism of its front camera — specifically, that it overly smooths skin.
Makena Kelly / The Verge:
AWS CEO Andy Jassy and Supermicro CEO Charles Liang join Apple CEO Tim Cook in calling for a retraction of Bloomberg's spy chip story  —  ‘[Tim Cook] is right.  Bloomberg story is wrong about Amazon, too.’  —  Today, executives from both Amazon and the server manufacturer, Super Micro …
Patrick Kennedy / ServeTheHome:
Nitasha Tiku / Wired:
Three recent books argue that big tech became powerful not because of “software disruption” but by ducking regulation, squeezing workers, strangling competitors  —  A FEW YEARS after the Great Recession, you couldn't scroll through Google Reader without seeing the word “disrupt.”
Shannon Liao / The Verge:
HTC begins taking preorders, only in cryptocurrency, for its blockchain phone Exodus 1 for 0.15 BTC or 4.78 ETH, about ~$960, and expects to ship in December  —  You have to buy it in bitcoin or Ether  —  HTC just announced actual specs for its much-hyped blockchain phone, the Exodus 1, and is letting people sign up for preorders.
Andrei Frumusanu / AnandTech:
Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 675, an 11nm mid-range ARM Cortex A76-based SOC with support for triple camera setups, promises better gaming performance  —  Today we're seeing a very interesting announcement from Qualcomm: The new Snapdragon 675 chipset is a direct successor …
Julian E. Barnes / New York Times:
Sources: US Cyber Command targets Russian operatives to deter them from spreading disinformation, in first known overseas cyberoperation to protect elections  —  WASHINGTON — The United States Cyber Command is targeting individual Russian operatives to try to deter them from spreading disinformation …
Alex Konrad / Forbes:
Envoy, which sells an iPad-based visitor management product, raises $43M Series B led by Menlo Ventures and plans new smart office products by end of year  —  Larry Gadea says he knew his startup Envoy was truly taking off when he found out WD-40 was using its software in multiple offices.
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
A look at Thalmic Labs' new normal-looking smart glasses, called Focals, that display info in the right lens and will ship next year for $1,000  —  Although few people seem to really want to wear smart glasses or goggles — think Google Glass or Snapchat Spectacles — a startup thinks it's figured …
Wall Street Journal:
SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son cancels speaking engagement at Saudi Arabia's Future Investment Initiative, but may still attend the event  —  Mr. Son becomes latest executive to cancel plans after the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi  —  RIYADH—SoftBank Group Corp.'s Chief Executive Masayoshi Son …
Dami Lee / The Verge:
Google says it will roll out a software update in the coming weeks to fix the Pixel 3's photo-saving issue  —  Google will fix an issue that caused some photos taken with Google Camera on the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL to not properly save.  A Google spokesperson provided this statement …
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Oracle acquires DataFox, a developer of “predictive intelligence as a service” across 2.8M companies' records and growing  —  Ingrid Lunden @ingridlunden / 7 hours  —  Oracle today announced that it has made another acquisition, this time to enhance both the kind of data …
More: ZDNet
Scott Scrivens / Android Police:
Chrome enables Picture-in-Picture support on desktop by default on macOS, Windows, and Linux  —  It's a popular feature on Android, especially useful if you want to watch YouTube videos while you do other things, and now Picture-in-picture (PiP) is officially coming to the desktop.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols / ZDNet:
Linus Torvalds back in charge of Linux, according to the Linux 4.19 announcement, over a month after temporarily stepping away to get help to fix his behavior  —  After a few weeks off to reconsider his role in the Linux community, Linus Torvalds is back in the saddle.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Mozilla announces ProtonVPN partnership; from Oct. 25, some Firefox users will see an ad to buy a $10/month VPN subscription when connected to unsecured WiFi  —  Selected Firefox users will be able to purchase a ProtonVPN version for $10.  Some of the money will go to support Mozilla and Firefox.
Jeremy Horwitz / VentureBeat:
FCC votes to expand 3.5GHz band to 5G and open 6GHz band to future Wi-Fi  —  Two votes from the FCC today resolved longstanding questions regarding the future of so-called “mid-band” radio spectrum in the United States.  In a 3-1 vote, FCC commissioners opened the 3.5GHz band up for use in 5G networks …

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