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Techmeme
August 16, 2019, 11:15 AM
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Top News

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.
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.
Will Oremus / OneZero:
YouTube's guidelines may not discriminate against LGBTQ creators, but their vagueness and ad-friendly conservatism leads to discriminatory enforcement
Biswarup Gooptu / The Economic Times:
India-based Twitter-like platform ShareChat, which supports multiple regional languages, raises $100M round led by Twitter, sources say at $600M-$650M valuation  —  Regional language social networking platform ShareChat has completed a $100 million (about Rs 718 crore) equity financing round led …
Hilary Milnes / Digiday:
Sources and a leaked pitch deck indicate that Amazon may have offered vendors the ability to bid for an Amazon Choice badge in 2017  —  Amazon has previously offered vendors the ability to “bid” for an Amazon's Choice badge by lowering prices and spending more money on advertising …
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Bluetooth SIG issues a security notice for the “KNOB” flaw, which allows hackers to steal data by brute forcing the encryption key used during bluetooth pairing  —  A new Bluetooth vulnerability named “KNOB” has been disclosed that allow attackers to more easily brute force …
Charlie Savage / New York Times:
In a letter to Congress, the Trump administration asks lawmakers to reauthorize a law that lets the NSA gain access to logs of phone and text records  —  The White House is seeking reauthorization of a law that lets the N.S.A. gain access to logs of Americans' phone and text records …
Paul Roberts / The Security Ledger:
Huge survey of 6K+ firmware images of devices by 18 vendors including Linksys and Netgear finds no improvement in software security and lax security standards  —  A survey of more than 6,000 firmware images spanning more than a decade finds no improvement in firmware security and lax security standards …
James Sanders / TechRepublic:
After the latest firmware update, some Surface Pro 6 and Surface Book 2 devices are throttling CPU speeds to 400 MHz; Microsoft says it is working on a fix  —  User reports indicate that an erroneously set CPU flag is sending Intel Core processors back into the Pentium II age.
The Information:
Sources: JD.com is talking with investment banks about a $500M US IPO in May for its online supermarket unit Dada-JD Daojia; Walmart owns 10% of Dada-JD Daojia  —  Chinese online retailer JD.com is in talks with bankers to list shares of its online supermarket joint venture in the U.S. next May …
More: Seeking Alpha.  Tweets: @amir
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.
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.
Ian King / Bloomberg:
Nvidia beats Q2 expectations with revenues of $2.58B, down 17% YoY, gaming chip sales of $1.3B, up 24% from Q1, and data center revenues of $655M, up 3% QoQ  —  - Chipmaker says all markets grew sequentially in quarter  — Stock rallies on optimism for end to inventory slump
Akanksha Rana / Reuters:
Report: Alibaba to buy NetEase's Kaola, one of the biggest Chinese shopping sites for imported goods, for $2B in cash  —  (Reuters) - Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has agreed to pay $2 billion in cash to buy Chinese e-commerce firm Kaola, local news outlet Caixin reported on Friday.  (bit.ly/2HcCI6C)

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:15 AM ET, August 16, 2019.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

Salon:
Salon, launched in 1995 to cover politics, culture, and more, says it is closing: “business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly”

Matthew Keys / TheDesk.net:
Nexstar reports Q3 net income up 285% YoY to $250M and net revenue up 78% YoY to $2.1B, as Q3 political ads brought in $317M; results include Tegna numbers

Gene Maddaus / Variety:
How Democrats' midterm wins may affect Hollywood and media: uncertainty over federal tax incentive bill, greater FCC oversight, restoring CPB funding, and more

More News

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
Jonathan Shieber / TechCrunch:
Cloudflare files for an IPO, citing sites like 8chan as one risk factor, says it had revenues of $192.7M in 2018, up 43% YoY, and a net loss of $87.2M
Cristina Tardáguila / Poynter:
Facebook is expanding its third-party fact checking program to Instagram, starting with US, and will downplay posts deemed fake on its Explore and Hashtag pages
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

Earlier Picks

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
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
Sean O'Kane / The Verge:
UPS takes a minority stake in self-driving truck startup TuSimple for an undisclosed sum, says it's been carrying UPS cargo between Phoenix and Tucson since May
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
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
Colin Lecher / The Verge:
About 200 Google employees sign a petition, saying they “refuse to be complicit” in potential cloud computing work for the US Customs & Border Protection agency
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