Techmeme
November 5, 2019, 5:55 PM

Top News

Makena Kelly / The Verge:
FTC says AT&T has agreed to pay $60M to settle the agency's 2014 lawsuit that alleged it lied to customers about “unlimited” data plans that it throttled  —  Unlimited should mean unlimited!  —  On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission announced that AT&T will pay $60 million to settle a case with the agency.
Washington Post:
Overview of TikTok's evolving censorship approach: ex-US staff say Chinese bosses set rules on videos with heavy kissing, political topics, subversive content  —  Managers insist they are revamping policies to give American staff greater autonomy from Beijing.
Brandon Kochkodin / Bloomberg:
Users on Reddit say they have discovered a flaw in Robinhood's system that lets them trade stocks with excess borrowed funds, essentially free money  —  A glitch in the Robinhood Markets Inc. system is allowing users to trade stocks with excess borrowed funds, giving them access to what amounts to free money.
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Google promises one more update coming in December for the original Google Pixel, which will then be past its three-year security update support window  —  Pour one out for Pixel  —  The Google Pixel and Pixel XL will get “one final software update” in December, the company confirms to The Verge.
Yaël Eisenstat / Washington Post:
A former head of election integrity operations at Facebook says the company's business model and ad targeting tools make it hard for it to not harm democracy  —  The company can't avoid damaging democracy.  —  I joined Facebook in June 2018 as its “head of Global Elections Integrity Ops” …
Kashmir Hill / New York Times:
Data brokers like Sift and Kustomer, which share consumers' est. lifetime value with companies, now share it with customers on request due to new privacy laws  —  Little-known companies are amassing your data — like food orders and Airbnb messages — and selling the analysis to clients.
Jennifer Langston / Microsoft:
Microsoft teams up with Warner Bros to store and retrieve the 1978 movie Superman on a piece of glass as a proof of concept test for Project Silica research  —  Microsoft and Warner Bros. have collaborated to successfully store and retrieve the entire 1978 iconic “Superman” …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Kaspersky identifies DarkUniverse, an APT that had been active from 2009 but went silent after a mention in Shadow Brokers' 2017 leak, and details 20 victims  —  The NSA had superior insight into foreign nation-state hacking operations than many cyber-security vendors.
Patrick Howell O'Neill / MIT Technology Review:
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Microsoft Surface Pro X review: beautiful design and good screen but expensive, slow for the price, has an unimpressive battery, and app compatibility issues  —  Better than expected isn't enough  —  The Surface Pro X is the computer Microsoft has tried to make for at least seven years.
New York Times:
A FL judge granted a warrant in July letting a detective override privacy rules of GEDmatch and search a database of 1.2M users; experts: it may set a precedent  —  Privacy experts say it could set a precedent, opening up all consumer DNA sites to law enforcement agencies across the country.
Kia Kokalitcheva / Axios:
Study of ~10K startups: women represent 13% of founders but own 7% of founder equity; 31% of all equity owners are women, but hold 6% of total startup equity  —  Female entrepreneurs have less equity in their own companies than do male entrepreneurs, according to a new report from Carta.

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