Techmeme
February 8, 2020, 11:00 AM

Top News

Natt Garun / The Verge:
A roundup of the coronavirus outbreak's impact on the tech sector, from closures of offices, stores, and factories in China to affecting MWC attendance  —  The outbreak shows that what impacts China impacts everything  —  The tech sector is currently feeling the impact of the coronavirus …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
A group calling itself OurMine briefly compromised Facebook's Twitter and Instagram accounts, seemingly via a third-party service called Khoros  —  OurMine is taking credit for the hacks  —  Several of Facebook's Twitter and Instagram accounts were hijacked this evening …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 may end up raising less than half of the planned $108B, with nearly all of its capital coming from SoftBank itself  —  The new pool could end up being less than half its planned size, with nearly all of its capital coming from SoftBank itself
Nirave Gondhia / Android Central:
Motorola Razr review: front quick view display is useful but bumps can be felt while using the foldable screen, poor battery life, and the camera is lackluster  —  Too many compromises, for too much money.  —  Motorola RAZR: The review  — Stunning design  — Folding display  — Average Battery
Reuters:
Coronavirus exposes China's surveillance state as apps show locations of the infected, cameras detect people with fevers and identify them even with masks, more  —  BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) - When the man from Hangzhou returned home from a business trip, the local police got in touch.
New York Times:
How predictive algorithms are increasingly being used to set police patrols, prison sentences, and probation rules in the US and Europe  —  Across the United States and Europe, software is making probation decisions and predicting whether teens will commit crime.  Opponents want more human oversight.
Pam Kostka / All Raise:
In 2019, 52 women became new VC or general partners in the US, up 37% from last year's record of 38; 65% of VC firms still don't have a woman partner  —  Correction: In a previous version of this blog post we published that there were 50 new female VC partners in 2019 but the number was actually 52.
New York Times:
The number of reported videos related to online child sex abuse reached 41M in 2019, surpassing the number of reported photos; Facebook found 85% of the total  —  In a first, videos outnumbered photos in reports to the authorities last year.  Facebook found the most imagery, the bulk of it on its Messenger app.
Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
Facebook says it has received 15K bug reports in 2019, awarded about $2.2M in bounties for 1,300 of them, up from ~$1.1M for 700 bugs in 2018  —  A few months ago, Facebook disclosed that apps were siphoning data from up to 9.5 million of its users.  They only found out thanks to a bug bounty submission.

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More News

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
AnandTech:

Earlier Picks

Wall Street Journal:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Joe DeBlasio / Google Online Security Blog:
Uber: