Techmeme
April 15, 2019, 4:10 AM

Top News

Joseph Cox / Motherboard:
Source: Outlook, MSN, and Hotmail were affected in breach; Microsoft now says email content was also exposed for ~6% of users whose email accounts were hacked  —  Hackers abused a Microsoft customer support portal that allowed them to read the emails of any non-corporate account.
Paul Mozur / New York Times:
Sources: how China uses AI to specifically track Uighurs, an ethnic minority, in the first known racist application of facial recognition to be widely deployed  —  In a major ethical leap for the tech world, Chinese start-ups have built algorithms that the government uses to track members of a largely Muslim minority group.
Olivia Carville / Bloomberg:
Facebook suffers third major outage in 2019, with all of its services down for ~2 hours on Sunday, after a ~24-hour outage in March, and a smaller crash in Jan.  —  - Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger down for hours  — Frustrated users took to Twitter to vent from across the world
Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times:
Sources: Apple is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to secure new games for its Arcade subscription service, with total budget likely to exceed $500M  —  Apple is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to secure new video games for its forthcoming Arcade subscription service …
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Sources: over half of HQ Trivia's staff signed a petition to depose CEO Rus Yusupov, who then fired some calling for the change, which led to plummeting morale  —  This week's banishment of host Scott Rogowsky was merely a symptom of the ongoing struggle to decide who will lead HQ Trivia.
Jennifer Valentino-DeVries / New York Times:
A detailed look at how police forces use “geofence” warrants and Google's Sensorvault location history database to find witnesses and suspects near crime scenes  —  The tech giant records people's locations worldwide.  Now, investigators are using it to find suspects and witnesses near crimes …
Keith J. Kelly / New York Post:
Sources: Apple paid Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, Rogers Media, and KKR a total of $100M for Texture, with $385M more to be paid out over the next 3 years  —  After paying at least $485 million, Apple said it will shut down Texture, its online magazine subscription service …
Sean Gallagher / Ars Technica:
An Illinois bill for banning IoT devices from collecting audio without owners' consent was substantially defanged after lobbying by the Internet Association  —  Lobbyists: Bill would punish even if failure to disclose was “accidental.”  —  On April 10, the Illinois State Senate passed the …
Thomas Brewster / Forbes:
When DEA got a warrant for LogMeIn to divulge a user's passwords, LastPass' encryption scheme meant it couldn't produce them, but other customer info was given  —  The government makes very few demands for data from password managers, but when it does it expects a lot, including login information, Forbes has learned.
David Gelles / New York Times:
Charity: water now accepts stock donations from shareholders of private startups like Uber to share some IPO proceeds as bonuses with the non-profit's staff  —  Entrepreneurs who own stakes in private companies can donate some of their equity to Charity: water.

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More News

Angelina Rascouet / Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

Chance Miller / 9to5Mac: