Techmeme: As we shop more online and think less about how our purchases reach our homes, a look at how our home delivery habit is reshaping the physical world (Samanth Subramanian/The Guardian)

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November 24, 2019, 11:10 PM

Top News

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian / ICIJ:

Leaked Chinese government docs reveal the mechanics of running mass detention camps in Xinjiang, predictive policing, mass surveillance, and snooping on expats — A new leak of highly classified Chinese government documents has uncovered the operations manual for running the mass detention camps …

More: BBC, New York Times, and Financial Times

Tweets: @jeremykonyndyk, @williamyang120, @parrav, @bethanyallenebr, @peter_dutton, @mgerrydoyle, @williamyang120, @amybwang, @dabeard, @pekingmike, @ryanfduffy, @bethanyallenebr, @dannyboycrump, and @icijorg

Charles Fitzgerald / Platformonomics:

Red Hat's big sale, disappointing exits of Hadoop-based startups and Pivotal show how public clouds like AWS affect business models of open source-focused firms — TL;DR: If the cloud didn't eat Hadoop Inc., Pivotal and Red Hat, what explains their diminished prospects?

Tweets: @bassamtabbara, @marypcbuk, @trengriffin, @jim_dowling, and @charlesfitz

Chris Stokel-Walker / Increment:

A look at the team behind VLC, which started as a student-run project in 1996 that is now part of a nonprofit with a for-profit consultancy managed by ~10 staff — How a group of university students transformed a school project into a media-player mainstay. — Teams

Tweets: @davezatz and @incrementmag

Julia Carrie Wong / The Guardian:

White nationalist outlets including VDare and Red Ice TV still operate on Facebook despite its ban on white nationalism; Facebook says it is investigating — Guardian analysis finds VDare and Red Ice TV among several outlets that are still on the platform despite Facebook's promised ban

Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:

A former Facebook employee who was embedded with the 2016 Trump campaign details how he leveraged Facebook's ad-targeting tools and products to help them win — James Barnes is now focused on using digital-ad strategies to try to get Trump out of office — After the 2016 presidential election …

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @natesilver538, @keithboykin, @noahshachtman, @antoniogm, @fmbutt, @adamsinger, @nickgillespie, @blakehounshell, @govhowarddean, @b52malmet, @jessekellydc, @jason_kint, @jonathanalter, @counternotions, @four4thefire, @slpng_giants, and @adamserwer

Nick Heath / TechRepublic:

Interview with Stephen Wolfram about the future of Wolfram|Alpha, how programming needs to evolve, Wolfram Language as a “computational language”, and more — The brains behind Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language talks about how programming languages need to develop.

Tweets: @techrepublic and @techrepublic

Helene Fouquet / Bloomberg:

Huawei sues for defamation in Paris after a researcher, broadcast journalist, and telco expert say on TV that it spies against the West and is state controlled — - Claim it's controlled by the Chinese state is false, it says — The company is seeking to sell 5G equipment in Europe

Tweets: @alecolarizi, @zackwhittaker, @dana_heide, and @mattwaxman1

Ava Kofman / ProPublica:

ProPublica claims to have found 57 unlabeled state-sponsored channels on YouTube; after presented with a list, YouTube labeled only 35 of them as such — ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they're published.

Tweets: @propublica and @moonalice

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:

India-based financial services startup Paytm raises $1B led by T. Rowe Price, valuing the company at ~$16B; Paytm has raised more than $3.3B to date — Paytm said on Monday it has raised $1 billion in a new financing round as the Noida-headquartered firm, which once dominated …

More: Times of India and SiliconANGLE

Samanth Subramanian / The Guardian:

As we shop more online and think less about how our purchases reach our homes, a look at how our home delivery habit is reshaping the physical world — The great trick of online retail has been to get us to shop more and think less about how our purchases reach our homes. By Samanth Subramanian

Tweets: @frankpasquale, @kinsale42, @sajithpai, and @mishdalton

Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg:

Carousell, SE Asia's biggest classifieds site, to merge with Telenor's 701Search; Telenor will invest $20M and have 32% stake in merged company valued at $850M+ — - The equity and cash deal gives Telenor 32% in combined company — Telenor's 701Search has business in Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam

Nathaniel Rich / Vanity Fair:

Inside the collapse of Quadriga crypto exchange, as law enforcement, accountants, and Reddit sleuths try to figure out if it was a legit operation or a scam — When Canadian blockchain whiz Gerald Cotten died unexpectedly last year, hundreds of millions of dollars in investor funds vanished into the crypto ether.

More: The only cryptocurrency …. Tweets: @adamsinger, @reformedbroker, @andymukherjee70, @morganhousel, and @mpelletiercio

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:10 PM ET, November 24, 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

Sara Fischer / Axios:

Source: Bari Weiss is planning to create a masthead for CBS News as part of a broader overhaul of standards and procedures

Todd Spangler / Variety:

Trump says Stephen Colbert is a “pathetic trainwreck” and “CBS should, ‘put him to sleep,’ NOW”; earlier CBS aired the Kennedy Center Honors, hosted by Trump

Lorcan Lovett / Nieman Reports:

A look at the state of independent media in Myanmar, which lost US and Swedish funding this year and where subscriptions aren't a dependable source of revenue

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More News

Jordan Crook / TechCrunch:

Eden, a B2B workplace management platform that connects office managers with service providers in 25 markets including Berlin and London, raises $25M Series B

Tweets: @sameerpatel

FinSMEs:

ColdQuanta, which uses ultracold atom tech, where atoms are cooled using lasers to manufacture components for quantum computing, raises $16.75M in seed funding

Li Tao / South China Morning Post:

Profile of China-based Wingtech, the world's largest ODM for smartphones, which has shipped 51M units in H1 2019 for clients like Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi

Michael Kwet / VICE:

Inside Vumacam's plans to build a network of AI-powered CCTV cameras across South Africa in areas where people of color are already disproportionately targeted

Tweets: @veauxdevillian, @tshegofatso_tm, @phat_controller, and @leahk28

Susan D'Agostino / Quanta Magazine:

Barbara Liskov, a Turing Award winner who invented some key principles of object-oriented programming, on what it takes a woman to get to the top of CS field

Tweets: @codeorg, @le_rond, @danlizotte, @quantamagazine, @rsukumar, @quantamagazine, @rubenverborgh, @quantamagazine, and @quantamagazine

Joseph Cox / VICE:

Sources: authorities have arrested an alleged member of The Chuckling Squad, the group that hacked Jack Dorsey's Twitter account in August

More: Engadget, Business Insider, Axios, and DataBreaches.net

Tweets: @josephfcox and @fizzily1

Earlier Picks

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturns a lower-court order that required the suspect in a child-porn case to turn over the password to his computer

More: Yahoo Finance and The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Kashmir Hill / New York Times:

A look at the Legal Aid Society of New York City's efforts to close the tech gap between public defenders and law enforcement with respect to digital forensics

Tweets: @nytimesbusiness, @byrontau, @amelia_acker, @sushantsin, @kashhill, @geomblog, @nytimes, and @tmluongo

Cory Weinberg / The Information:

Source: Airbnb lost about $100M in Q2 2019, compared to the profit of $10M it made a year ago

Tweets: @coryweinberg, @modestproposal1, @edbott, and @eliotwb

Monica Nickelsburg / GeekWire:

Amazon filed its formal protest over JEDI on Friday, citing a Fox News segment and a Trump rally as evidence of improper political pressure from the White House

More: Washington Post, CNET, Mashable, Vox, SiliconANGLE, Axios, and Fortune

Tweets: @paulkrugman, @megawatts55, and @keithboykin. Thanks:@taylor_soper

Mark Bergen / Bloomberg:

About 200 Googlers protest placing of two of their colleagues on administrative leave over the actions they took opposing some of Google management's decisions

More: International Business Times, Engadget, Yahoo Finance, CNET, Fast Company, Vox, OneZero, and Forbes. Tweets: @josheidelson

Queenie Wong / CNET:

Facebook built a now discontinued internal app, report says between 2015 and 2016, that let employees identify colleagues and friends via facial recognition

Source: Business Insider. More: Gizmodo, Engadget, SlashGear, MSPoweruser, Mashable, and VentureBeat

Tweets: @hodgesmr, @robaeprice, @saradannerdukic, @fchollet, @tonyromm, @pauldokas, @xeni, @jkarsh, @dtunkelang, @coreen_anne, @brooklynmarie, @robaeprice, @robaeprice, @clarajeffery, and @oknox