Techmeme
February 12, 2020, 4:10 PM

Top News

Tom Warren / The Verge:
GSMA says it has canceled Mobile World Congress after the coronavirus made it “impossible” to hold the event  —  MWC 2020 is no more  —  The world's biggest phone show, Mobile World Congress, is no longer taking place this year.  After coronavirus threatened to throw MWC into chaos …
New York Times:
Andy Rubin's Essential Products, which raised $330M to build smartphones and was valued at $1B, says it is ceasing operations  —  The smartphone company founded by Mr. Rubin, a former Google executive, struggled to win over customers.  —  SAN FRANCISCO — Essential Products …
Financial Times:
Facebook says it has banned a network of two dozen fake pages and accounts linked to two Southeast Asian telecoms for using disinformation against rivals  —  South-east Asian providers said to have used fake accounts to discredit rivals  —  Facebook has alleged that one of south-east Asia's …
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
WhatsApp says it now has 2B users worldwide, up from the 1.5B it announced two years ago  —  WhatsApp, the most popular messaging service, revealed today just how big it has become.  The Facebook-owned app said it has amassed two billion users, up from 1.5 billion it revealed two years ago.
Steven Levy / Wired:
Book excerpt from Steven Levy's Facebook: The Inside Story, with a look at Zuckerberg's lost handwritten journal, in which he noted plans for world domination  —  In the early days of Facebook, Zuck kept his plans for world domination in handwritten journals.  He destroyed them.
John Detrixhe / Quartz:
Research: Apple Pay makes up about 5% of global card transactions and is on pace to double that share by 2025  —  Future of Finance  —  New technology is upending everything in finance.  —  Apple's mobile wallet is gobbling up a growing chunk of card payments around the world.
Alex Hern / The Guardian:
UK proposes plans to put media regulator Ofcom in charge of regulating social media, with a focus on removing illegal content and minimizing “harmful” content  —  Ministers unveil plans to block harmful content, while guaranteeing free speech  —  Ofcom will be put in charge …
Edward Ongweso Jr / VICE:
Consumer advocacy group DoNotPay launches Robo Revenge, an app that fights robocallers by giving them burner credit card info and then helping users sue them  —  DoNotPay, the family of consumer advocacy services meant to protect people from corporate exploitation, is launching a new app aimed …
Data Protection Commission:
Ireland's Data Protection Commission: Facebook has postponed launching Dating on Valentine's Day in Europe after DPC resorted to an inspection to procure docs  —  Facebook Ireland first contacted the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) in relation to its intention to roll-out a new Dating feature in the EU on Monday 3 February.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
Google rolls out Emoji Kitchen, which mashes up two emojis into a sticker, for Gboard on Android  —  Compatible with WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, and more  —  There are already hundreds of emoji available to cover every emotion from yawning to being a straight-up drunk weirdo.
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Reuters launches a new Reuters Fact Check business unit and blog and partners with Facebook to review news headlines, deepfakes, and user generated content  —  Eye-witness photos and videos distributed by news wire Reuters already go through an exhaustive media verification process.
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Regulators should be wary of unintended consequences as they look closer at acquisitions by big tech, because the current system usually works well for everyone  —  While primum non nocere — Latin for “First, do no harm” — is commonly associated with the Hippocratic Oath taken by physicians …
The Verge:
A look at online coding program Lambda School, which lets students defer tuition payments until they have jobs, but that many say is costly and under-delivers  —  Students at Lambda School say the program hasn't delivered on its promise  —  Bethany Surber was sleeping on friends' couches …
Tweets: @ossia, @dhh, @dhh, @_danilo, and @knguyen
Hired:
State of Software Engineers 2019: global demand for AR/VR engineers up by 1,400%, gaming developers up 146%, security engineers up 49% but slower than in 2018  —  Overview  —  The worldwide process of digital transformation, while something of a buzzword, reflects a critical truth: every company is now a technology company.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Nominet survey of CISOs at large US and UK companies finds 88% are “moderately or tremendously stressed”, resulting in an average tenure of 26 months  —  Report: The vast majority of interviewed CISO executives (88%) report high levels of stress, a third report stress-caused …

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