Techmeme
December 20, 2018, 3:25 PM

Top News

Lauren Feiner / CNBC:
Apple says it will stop selling iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 in its 15 retail stores across Germany after Qualcomm was granted an injunction by a Munich court  —  - Last week, a Chinese court ordered an injunction against Apple over an alleged patent violation filed by chipmaker Qualcomm.
BBC:
UK's Gatwick airport was shut down on Wednesday and Thursday after drones were seen flying over the runway; about 760 flights were due to fly on Thursday  —  Tens of thousands of passengers have been disrupted by drones flying over one of the UK's busiest airports.
Ime Archibong / Facebook:
Facebook confirms Spotify, Netflix, Dropbox, and RBC had read/write/delete access for messaging integrations, says it was experimental and ended three years ago  —  In the past day, we've been accused of disclosing people's private messages to partners without their knowledge.
Charlie Warzel / BuzzFeed News:
Ryan Vlastelica / Bloomberg:
Arno Schuetze / Reuters:
Amazon gives a German Alexa user, who requested his personal data under GDPR, access to 1,700 audio files of another user; Amazon says it was due to human error  —  FRANKFURT (Reuters) - A user of Amazon's (AMZN.O) Alexa voice assistant in Germany got access to more than a thousand recordings …
Russell Brandom / The Verge:
Slack is deactivating accounts it says are linked to Iran to comply with US sanctions without warning the users  —  ‘They are either incompetent at OFAC interpretation or racist’  —  This morning, many Slack users with ties to Iran discovered their accounts had been abruptly deactivated.
CNBC:
DOJ charges two alleged members of China's state sponsored hacking unit APT10 with stealing data from at least 45 US tech companies and government agencies  —  - They are accused of stealing information from at least 45 U.S. tech companies and government agencies.
Dara Kerr / CNET:
Uber says it will bring its self-driving cars back on the road on Thursday in Pittsburgh, nine months after a fatal crash  —  Uber took its self-driving cars off the road last March, after a fatal accident, the first known pedestrian death caused by a vehicle in full autonomous mode.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Amazon says it is rolling out an Alexa integration with Wolfram Alpha to users in US  —  Alexa's getting a bit smarter, courtesy of Wolfram Alpha.  Amazon today announced that its cross-platform assistant will integrate with Wolfram Research's computational knowledge engine to answer math- and science-related questions.
More: TechCrunch and Wired
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Apple says some 2018 iPad Pros ship with a very slight bend in the aluminum chassis due to their manufacturing process but doesn't consider it to be a defect  —  Apple has confirmed to The Verge that some of its 2018 iPad Pros are shipping with a very slight bend in the aluminum chassis.
BuzzFeed News:
Investigation finds Chinese censors are now allowing criticism of Trump and the US on WeChat, as the US-China trade war heats up  —  Negative articles and comments about Trump were censored on the Chinese internet as recently as this summer.  But now the floodgates appear to be open.
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
French data science startup Dataiku raises $101M Series C led by Iconiq Capital  —  Dataiku wants to turn buzzwords into an actual service.  The company has been focused on data tools for many years, before everybody started talking about big data, data science and machine learning.

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Earlier Picks

Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Scott Moritz / Bloomberg:
Ian Hamilton / UploadVR:
Washington Post:
Peter Bright / Ars Technica: