Techmeme
December 26, 2018, 1:05 PM

Top News

Don Reisinger / Fortune:
Amazon announces a record-breaking holiday season with the number of voice-activated shopping orders placed using Alexa rising 3X YoY  —  Shoppers are increasingly using their voices to buy products online.  —  Amazon on Wednesday said that the number of voice-activated orders placed via …
Wolfie Zhao / CoinDesk:
Crypto mining startup Bitmain confirms layoffs, which, source says, may affect half of its total headcount, with some departments being laid off entirely  —  Months after it filed an application to go public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Beijing-based cryptocurrency mining giant Bitmain …
Wall Street Journal:
Analysis: SEC and state regulators brought 90+ crypto-related cases in the past two years, recovering just ~$36M; cases increased as the market crashed  —  SEC and state regulators have brought more than 90 crypto cases over the past two years, but tracing funds is hard because of the elusive nature of the currency
Julia Alexander / The Verge:
Snapchat adds lenses specifically for dogs, after launching lenses for cats last month, available now  —  Now your dog can up his or her social clout, too  —  Snapchat first made users fall in love by creating lenses that could turn them into dogs.  Now, the company is going full circle, and adding lenses specifically for dogs.
Abrar Al-Heeti / CNET:
Zachary Fryer-Biggs / Wired:
Sources describe DOD's plan to win “hearts and minds” in Silicon Valley, amid frustration and anger inside the Pentagon after Google pulled out of Project Maven  —  THE AMERICAN MILITARY is desperately trying to get a leg up in the field of artificial intelligence …
Alastair Marsh / Bloomberg:
Crypto efforts of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and others are in limbo after bitcoin's months-long fall and weak demand from institutional clients  —  Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and many more built it.  But they didn't come.  —  Limbo—that's where to find Wall Street when it comes to cryptocurrencies.
Megha Rajagopalan / BuzzFeed News:
How efforts by independent investigators and NGOs to document human rights violations in war zones are hampered by proactive content removals by social networks  —  Investigators depend on photos and videos posted online from war zones.  But takedowns by Facebook and YouTube are putting …
Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:
In 2018, smartphone makers, users, and some academics began to appreciate the affects of excessive smartphone use, leading to iOS' Screen Time and other tools  —  But will we actually reclaim our time from smartphones?  —  At the beginning of this year, I was using my iPhone to browse …

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Mara Hvistendahl / MIT Technology Review:

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