Techmeme: Microsoft hires former AG Eric Holder to determine if AnyVision complies with the ethical principles stipulated during the facial recognition company's Series A (Olivia Solon/NBC News)

Top News

Twitter bans political ads globally, will allow some “cause-based” ads with limited targeting and promotion of issue-related fact-based reporting from news orgs — - Twitter laid out the framework for its new policy on political ads, which bans certain advertisers and has stricter rules for issue ads.

More: New York Times, The Verge, CNN, Politico, Social Media Today, OneZero, Axios, Telegraph, Adweek, Fortune, BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, CNET, AdExchanger, Mashable, Gizmodo, Engadget, Yahoo Finance, and The Daily Dot

Tweets: @vijaya, @vijaya, @cnnbusiness, @mmasnick, @vijaya, @willoremus, @vijaya, @cnbcnow, @vijaya, @mcclure111, @vijaya, @willoremus, @scottlucas86, @delbius, @hadas_gold, @twittersafety, @b_fung, @vijaya, @donie, @vijaya, and @rmac18

See also Mediagazer

Emily Stewart / Vox:

Twitter acknowledges that its new guidance on political and cause-based ads is essentially a rough policy outline with lots of details still to be worked out

More: Slate, The Guardian, and Associated Press

Olivia Solon / NBC News:

Microsoft hires former AG Eric Holder to determine if AnyVision complies with the ethical principles stipulated during the facial recognition company's Series A — According to five sources, AnyVision's technology has powered a secret military surveillance project that has monitored Palestinians in the West Bank.

More: WebProNews, Gizmodo, Business Insider, and Axios

Tweets: @oliviasolon and @cfarivar

Colin Lecher / The Verge:

Email: Sundar Pichai says Google is scaling back weekly all-hands “TGIF” meetings to once a month; meetings will focus only “on product and business strategy” — CEO announced changes to TGIF meeting in an email — Google's weekly town halls, internally known as …

More: Washington Post, CNBC, Engadget, Gizmodo, Business Insider, 9to5Google, and CNET

Tweets: @mikeisaac, @carnage4life, and @caseynewton

Tucker Higgins / CNBC:

The Supreme Court says it will hear Google's appeal in the copyright lawsuit brought by Oracle over Java APIs — - The Supreme Court said on Friday that it will hear a dispute between tech giants Oracle and Google in a blockbuster case that could lead to billions of dollars in fines and shape copyright law in the internet era.

More: The Verge, Ars Technica, Bloomberg, Techdirt, Axios, ZDNet, XDA Developers, Android Authority, SiliconANGLE, CNET, 9to5Google, Associated Press, Financial Post, Seeking Alpha, and Slashdot

Tweets: @reckless, @jordannovet, @leojtravis10, and @christiangruber

Todd Spangler / Variety:

Hulu to raise its Hulu + Live TV price by 22%, from $44.99/month to $54.99/month, for all subscribers starting on December 18 — Hulu is implementing its second price increase in less than a year for its Hulu With Live TV product — with the base package of 60-plus live channels increasing 22%, to $54.99 per month.

More: 9to5Google, TechCrunch, Engadget, Tubefilter, Mashable, KnowTechie, The Verge, Fast Company, New York Post, and 9to5Mac

Tweets: @pkafka, @benbajarin, @pkafka, and @dcseifert

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Alex Sherman / CNBC:

Sources: John Legere has no plans to leave T-Mobile and take the CEO job at WeWork — - T-Mobile CEO John Legere isn't planning to take the CEO job at WeWork according to people familiar with the matter. — WeWork, which is being taken over by SoftBank, is considering a number of people for the CEO role.

More: WebProNews, The Verge, Bloomberg, Business Insider, TmoNews, Engadget, CNET, and Seeking Alpha

Tweets: @sherman4949, @jbarro, and @madra0615

Bill Wasik / New York Times:

A look at how the internet deviated from its sunny, American, all-devouring vision of mass empowerment, and why today it doesn't mean the same thing to everyone — The Internet Dream Became a Nightmare. What Will Become of It Now? — “Hey, everyone!” the world's eighth-richest man said …

More: Memex 1.1 and The Verge. Tweets: @nytmag

Tony Wan / EdSurge:

Guild Education, which helps companies connect their employees to online higher-ed programs offered by universities, raises $157M Series D at a $1B+ valuation — The education technology industry has given birth to its newest unicorn, one that wants to connect employees at Fortune 1000 corporations …

More: PR Newswire, Education Dive, and Forbes

Tweets: @tonywan, @denstartupweek, and @astasiamyers

Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times:

Jimmy Wales' WikiTribune, which launched as a crowdfunded news site in 2017, relaunches as WT:Social, a donor-funded social networking and “news sharing” site — Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a rival to Facebook and Twitter that he hopes will combat “clickbait” and misleading headlines.

More: The Next Web, ZDNet, Engadget, Geek.com, Fossbytes, and TechSpot

Tweets: @ambermac and @financialtimes

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The Information:

Sources: after exploring partnerships with banks in 2018 to offer an Amazon-branded checking account, Amazon scrapped those plans in their early stages — This week, Google confirmed that it will soon offer checking accounts to its users. But one of the company's biggest rivals—Amazon …

More: Seeking Alpha

Mike Butcher / TechCrunch:

Let's Do This, a platform that lists ~30K races and provides personalized recommendations for participants in events like marathons, raises $15M Series A — Back in September, endurance events marketplace Let's Do This (a YC alumni) raised a $5m seed round from a number of US investors …

More: Crunchbase News, CNBC, Tech.eu, and International Business Times

Janko Roettgers / Variety:

Verizon releases a Stream TV device running Android TV, heavily featuring YouTube TV, with none of Verizon Media's properties promoted and Netflix app blocked — Verizon has an answer to Roku, but it's not talking much about it: The mobile carrier quietly released a new streaming device …

More: Light Reading

See also Mediagazer

Christina Farr / CNBC:

PillPack adds “Amazon Pharmacy” to its logo and says it has filed paperwork that adds “Amazon Pharmacy” to the licensed name of its pharmacy fulfillment centers — - PillPack, the Internet pharmacy it acquired last year, has updated its logo to “PillPack by Amazon Pharmacy.”

More: Seeking Alpha

Tiernan Ray / ZDNet:

Facebook's AI team details XLM-R, a natural language model which translates between 100 languages, but struggles with the limits of existing computing power — Facebook AI research's latest breakthrough in natural language understanding, called XLM-R, performs cross-language tasks …

Duncan Riley / SiliconANGLE:

Cybrary, a crowdsourced freemium cybersecurity training platform for enterprises that says it has 3M individual users, raises $15M Series B — Online cybersecurity career development startup Cybrary Inc. today said it has raised $15 million in new funding to accelerate the growth of the company's online workforce development platform.

More: IBL News and FinSMEs

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