Techmeme
December 7, 2018, 7:50 PM

Top News

Nitasha Tiku / Wired:
Microsoft steps up calls for regulation of facial recognition tech; research group AI Now stresses urgency for companies to open their AI algorithms to auditing  —  AFTER A HELLISH year of tech scandals, even government-averse executives have started professing their openness to legislation.
Kate Conger / New York Times:
Canada argues Huawei CFO committed fraud by misrepresenting a Huawei subsidiary as an independent company, tricking US banks into violating Iran sanctions  —  VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The reasons that the United States asked the Canadian authorities to arrest a top executive …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Sources: Apple acquired Platoon, a UK-based startup that uses analytics to source talent like musicians and writers to produce, distribute, and sell their work  —  Spotify has made some significant moves to bypass record labels and work directly with artists, and there are signs that Apple …
Jackson Ryan / CNET:
DeepMind's new AI program, AlphaZero, taught itself to play and beat the world's best AI in three different board games: chess, shogi, and Go  —  Humans have mostly accepted that they will never be as good at chess as the robots, but now even the robots have to accept they will never be as good as other robots.
Lauren Thomas / CNBC:
Walmart to acquire the assets of Art.com, an online seller of art and wall decor which, a source says, was recently bringing in $300M in sales annually  —  - Marc Lore, head of Walmart's U.S. e-commerce business, has said the company could one day own upwards of 40 digitally native brands.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft says it will rebuild Edge to run on Google's open source Chromium project and will make it available on macOS, Windows 7, and Windows 8  —  A Chromium version of Edge will also arrive on Windows 7 and Windows 8  —  Microsoft is announcing some significant changes to its Edge browser today.
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Reuters:
EU's technology commissioner: EU should be worried about Huawei and other Chinese tech companies because of the risk they pose to its industry and security  —  BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union should be worried about Huawei [HWT.UL] and other Chinese technology companies because of the risk …
Katie Collins / CNET:
Italy's competition authority fines Facebook a total of $11.4M for using people's data for commercial purposes in ways that break the country's laws  —  Italy's Competition Authority on Friday slapped Facebook with two fines that total 10 million euros ($11.4M) for using people's data …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
UK-based Boku, a carrier billing services provider, says it has acquired Danal, a US-based mobile identity and authentication service, and will pay up to $68M  —  After going public in the U.K. last year, Boku has made an acquisition to expand its carrier billing services …

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