Techmeme
December 31, 2018, 8:15 AM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Amazon is planning to build and expand Whole Foods stores across the US to put more customers within range of its Prime Now two-hour delivery service  —  Expansion would widen tech giant's delivery reach  —  Amazon.com Inc. AMZN 1.12% is planning to build and expand Whole Foods stores across …
Los Angeles Times:
Malware attack on Tribune Publishing's network disrupts the printing and distribution of Saturday editions of LA Times, WSJ, NYT, and other papers  —  A cyberattack that appears to have originated from outside the United States caused major printing and delivery disruptions at several newspapers across …
Madhumita Murgia / Financial Times:
Privacy International: popular Android apps like TripAdvisor, Kayak, Indeed, MyFitnessPal share data with Facebook without user consent, possibly violating GDPR  —  Some of the most popular apps for Android smartphones, including Skyscanner, TripAdvisor and MyFitnessPal …
Eric Bellman / Wall Street Journal:
How Amazon is opening tiny stores, adding local language descriptors, and accepting cash payments to target the 800M people living outside India's big cities  —  The retailer is targeting hundreds of millions of new online shoppers in India's countryside by adding Hindi and videos …
New York Times:
In a formerly undisclosed memo from March, a top FTC enforcement official said Facebook wasn't at fault for Cambridge Analytica's abuses; FTC says probe ongoing  —  Last spring, soon after Facebook acknowledged that the data of tens of millions of its users had improperly been obtained …
Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica:
Big players in autonomous driving like Uber, Tesla, and Waymo had a disappointing 2018, but several startups with a “minimum viable product” made good progress  —  Big companies struggled but small ones moved forward.  —  As 2018 dawned, expectations for self-driving vehicles were sky-high:
More: Mashable
Andrew Tarantola / Engadget:
AI image processing for computer vision, facial recognition, image generation, and other applications saw marked improvements in 2018  —  Computer scientists have spent more than two decades teaching, training and developing machines to see the world around them.
Julia Reda:
European Commission to start offering bug bounties in January on 14 Free Software projects like Notepad++ and VLC that the EU institutions rely on  —  It's been a while since I last wrote about the Free and Open Source Software Audit project, FOSSA, so let me start with a quick recap …
Stella Yifan Xie / Wall Street Journal:
How Booking Holdings, formerly Priceline, is betting on China's online travel market with partnerships and more than $2B in investments in Chinese companies  —  Booking, formerly Priceline, is investing heavily in Chinese travel startups  —  Nearly two decades ago, Priceline.com …
Abhimanyu Ghoshal / The Next Web:
Inside digital music piracy and sharing in the 2000s via P2P networks like Napster, LimeWire, Gnutella, as well as IRC and internet music service Audiogalaxy  —  A couple of decades ago - well before a $10 monthly fee would unlock access to virtually every song ever recorded through streaming services …

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