Techmeme
August 16, 2019, 12:50 AM

Top News

Elizabeth Lopatto / The Verge:
A close reading of the S-1 of the soap opera that is The We Company, a “tech company” whose mission “is to elevate the world's consciousness”  —  On August 14th, The We Company (the company formerly known as WeWork) filed its mandatory S-1 paperwork to go public, and it's worth reading in full.
Dan Primack / Axios:
The Keyword:
Google Assistant now lets users create reminders that can be assigned to friends or family, including scheduled time-based or location-based reminders  —  If you're a fellow parent, you probably spend a lot of time coordinating with your partner through on-the-fly conversations, text messages or phone calls.
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Apple sues mobile device virtualization company Corellium, accusing it of copyright infringement for illegally replicating iOS, along with iPhone and iPad apps  —  Apple today filed a lawsuit against Corellium, a mobile device virtualization company that supports iOS.
Jeff John Roberts / Fortune:
Coinbase has acquired the custody business of Xapo, a service best known for storing bitcoins in a vault under a Swiss mountain; source says for $55M  —  Cryptocurrency firm Coinbase has acquired the custody business of Xapo, a service best known for storing Bitcoins in a vault under a Swiss mountain.
Shirin Ghaffary / Vox:
Study: leading AI models to detect hate speech are 1.5x more likely to flag tweets by African Americans as offensive or hateful, partly due to social context  —  A new study shows that leading AI models are 1.5 times more likely to flag tweets written by African Americans as “offensive” compared to other tweets.
Will Oremus / OneZero:
YouTube's guidelines may not discriminate against LGBTQ creators, but their vagueness and ad-friendly conservatism leads to discriminatory enforcement  —  A new lawsuit highlights a basic injustice in YouTube's “ad-friendly” policies  —  ouTube wants to be a platform for self-expression for all kinds of people.
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple says its US job footprint reached 2.4M and it is on track to hit its goal of directly contributing $350B to the US economy by 2023  —  Apple today has shared an update on its job footprint and growth in the United States.  It touts that its US job footprint is 2.4 million people in the US.
Aric Toler / bellingcat:
A deep dive into Amazon FC Ambassadors program finds 53 Ambassador accounts in seven countries, some of which are using fake identities and recycling accounts  —  On August 14, a Twitter thread that included a small army of “Amazon FC Ambassadors” went viral, bringing to light Amazon's year-long social media brand ambassador program.
Karl Bode / VICE:
Google says data from its new “Password Checkup” Chrome extension shows that 1.5% of all website logins use credentials that have been compromised  —  New ‘Password Checkup’ Chrome extension found 1.5 percent of all website logins use compromised credentials, a figure that's higher for porn websites.
The Information:
Investors and employees of Toptal, a freelancing platform with ~$200M revenue and originally funded by $1.5M in convertible notes, have ended up with no equity  —  Toptal, a service that connects companies with freelance software engineers, is a Silicon Valley success story.
Ronald Eikenberg / heise online:
Data leak in Kaspersky's antivirus software for Windows has allowed third parties to potentially track users by injecting unique IDs into web pages since 2015  —  Kaspersky promises security and data protection.  However, a data leak allowed third parties to spy on users while they were surfing the web.
April Glaser / Slate:
Tech companies can do a lot more to protect the identities of people speaking in recordings used to train AI, like shifting the voice or gender of the speaker  —  It turns out that Siri, Alexa, and whatever it is you call Facebook Messenger have been a little loose-lipped with your conversations.

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More News

Eugene Kim / CNBC:

Earlier Picks

Colin Lecher / The Verge:
Mariella Moon / Engadget: