Techmeme
August 5, 2019, 1:50 AM

Top News

Robert Evans / bellingcat:
El Paso, the third mass shooting announced on 8chan, shows how its /pol/ board deliberately radicalizes users into mass shooters and gamifies massacring people  —  On August 3, 2019, at around 11am local time, initial police reports indicated that a gunman had walked into an El Paso Wal-Mart and opened fire.
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
Cloudflare says it will stop providing 8chan with DDoS protection services, but 8chan's domain registrar, Tucows, says it has no plans to ban the site  —  Fredrick Brennan was getting ready for church at his home in the Philippines when the news of a mass shooting in El Paso arrived.
Matthew Prince / The Cloudflare Blog:
Cloudflare CEO on why the company terminated DDoS protection service for 8chan: the site was “lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths”  —  The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio are horrific tragedies.  In the case of the El Paso shooting …
Ryan Broderick / BuzzFeed News:
If 8chan vanished, its users would likely just flock to a new copycat site, like how 4chan users switched to 8chan amid increased moderation during Gamergate  —  “If 8chan is shutdown here is what will happen: someone else will spin up a new imageboard, say 20chan or whatever.  People will flock to that."
Karen Hao / MIT Technology Review:
A look at edtech startups like Squirrel AI that are using AI to personalize learning in China, where fierce academic competition is driving an AI education boom  —  In recent years, the country has rushed to pursue “intelligent education.”  Now its billion-dollar ed-tech companies are planning to export their vision overseas.
Maddy Myers / Kotaku:
E3 website leaks personal info, including addresses and phone numbers, of 2,000+ reporters and content creators; E3 has removed file but data still circulates  —  A spreadsheet containing the contact information and personal addresses of over 2,000 games journalists, editors …
Sharon Terlep / Wall Street Journal:
How companies use AI in customer service: some to serve clients better, and some to find the “breakpoint” at which their service is so bad that a customer quits  —  Technology lets companies see how badly they can treat consumers, right up until the moment they bolt
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Report: out of 188,620 extensions available on the Chrome Web Store, ~50% have fewer than 16 installs and 87% have fewer than 1,000; only 13 have 10M+ users  —  Around 87% of all Google Chrome extensions have fewer than 1,000 installs.  —  There are 188,620 extensions available on the Chrome Web Store …

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Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch: