Techmeme
February 14, 2019, 7:05 PM

Top News

J. David Goodman / New York Times:
Amazon says it has canceled plans to build HQ2 in New York City, focusing instead on Northern Virginia and Nashville, following backlash  —  Amazon on Thursday canceled its plans to build an expansive corporate campus in New York City after facing an unexpectedly fierce backlash from some lawmakers …
Tony Romm / Washington Post:
Sources: the FTC and Facebook are negotiating a record multi-billion dollar fine to settle the agency's investigation into the company's privacy practices  —  The Federal Trade Commission and Facebook are negotiating over a multi-billion dollar fine that would settle the agency's investigation …
Hugh Son / CNBC:
JP Morgan has created JPM Coin, a digital token tied to the US dollar that will be used to instantly settle transactions; trials set to start in a few months  —  - Engineers at the lender have created the “JPM Coin,” a digital token that will be used to instantly settle transactions between clients of its wholesale payments business.
James Vincent / The Verge:
OpenAI says it won't release the dataset behind GPT-2, its new text generator algorithm that can write, translate, and summarize text, due to fears of misuse  —  OpenAI's researchers knew they were on to something when their language modeling program wrote a convincing essay on a topic they disagreed with.
Stephen Nellis / Reuters:
Apple says it will resume selling banned iPhone 7 and 8 models in Germany using only chips from Qualcomm, after it had “no choice” but to stop using Intel chips  —  (Reuters) - Apple Inc said Thursday that it will resume selling older iPhone models in its stores in Germany …
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Sources: Facebook keeps a “lookout” list of ex-employees and users who made threats against the company, and sometimes uses its products to track their location  —  - Facebook maintains a list of individuals that its security guards must “be on lookout” for that is comprised …
TechCrunch:
Alibaba's Ant Financial buys London-based payments company WorldFirst in a deal that sources say is valued at around $700M  —  Ant Financial, the financial services giant affiliated with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, has made its first big move into Europe.
Sarah Frier / Bloomberg:
Facebook says it is exploring ways to address anti-vaccine misinformation including reducing or removing it from recommendations and demotion in search results  —  Facebook Inc., under pressure to reduce harmful, misleading and fake content, said it is exploring removing anti-vaccine information …
Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:
JibJab, one of the first companies that let people insert selfies into videos, GIFs and e-cards, has been acquired by Catapult Capital for an undisclosed sum  —  JibJab, one of the first companies that let people insert selfies into videos, gifs, and e-cards, has been acquired by Catapult Capital.
Reuters:
Illicit software distributors are using iOS enterprise developer certificates to distribute hacked versions of popular apps like Spotify and Minecraft  —  SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Software pirates have hijacked technology designed by Apple Inc to distribute hacked versions of Spotify …
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Pinpoint, which is building a data analytics platform for software engineering, raises $13.5M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners  —  For those without the technical know-how, software development — which more often than not involves a tangled web of commits, reviews, bug testing …
More: FinSMEs and TechCrunch

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More News

Faine Greenwood / Slate:

Earlier Picks

James Vincent / The Verge: