Techmeme: New York City-based Spruce, whose tech helps buyers, sellers, and lenders digitize paperwork for completing real estate transactions, raises $29M Series B (Danny Crichton/TechCrunch)

Top News

Sources: Trump is considering the establishment of a commission that would examine allegations of anticonservative bias and censorship on social media — Move is likely to draw pushback from tech companies; ACLU raises free-speech concerns — WASHINGTON—President Trump is considering establishing …

More: CNET, The Verge, Gizmodo, The Hill, Seeking Alpha, and Reclaim The Net

Tweets: @brianstelter, @jeffjarvis, @brettredacted, @jason_kint, @juddlegum, @melissaryan, @brianmfloyd, and @donie

Seth Colaner / VentureBeat:

An overview of how governments around the world are using smartphone data, apps, drones, facial recognition, and AI to track COVID-19 and surveil citizens — Now that the world is in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic, governments are quickly deploying their own cocktails of tracking methods.

More: OneZero , VentureBeat, and Lifehacker

Tweets: @brendakleong, @obrien, and @mrodofficial

Kai-Fu Lee / Wired:

AI has played a useful but fragmented role in the global fight against COVID-19, from predicting outbreaks to aiding diagnosis and drug discovery efforts — Disease diagnosis, drug discovery, robot delivery—artificial intelligence is already powering change in the pandemic's wake.

More: Engadget. Tweets: @kaifulee, @nxthompson, and @wired

Camilla Tominey / Telegraph:

Boris Johnson instructed officials to draw up plans to reduce Huawei's involvement in UK's 5G networks to zero by 2023, a reversal of a softer policy approach — The Prime Minister has instructed officials to draw up plans that would see China's involvement in the UK's 5G network reduced to zero

More: The Guardian, TechCrunch, Financial Times, Gizmodo, The Verge, Seeking Alpha, Engadget, Light Reading, Pocketnow, Politico, and CNET

Tweets: @alibunkallsky, @jerometaylor, @benwood, @rlheinrichs, @thorstenbenner, @nilegardiner, @tom_fowdy, @tedcruz, @damiangreen, @andrewbgreene, @brexitalex, @tomtugendhat, and @owenpaterson

Kyle Bradshaw / 9to5Google:

An internal build of Google Messages 6.2 shows end-to-end encryption could be coming soon to RCS messages — Today, the folks at APKMirror got ahold of an internal “dogfood” build of Google Messages version 6.2. Here, “dogfood” is used in the sense of the phrase “eat your own dog food,” …

More: Releases, XDA Developers, The Verge, PhoneArena, Ausdroid, Engadget, and Pocketnow

Tweets: @evansims, @prostasiainc, @andy_watt, @backlon, and @wongmjane

Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed News:

Facebook's removal of coronavirus misinfo will make its hands-off approach to removing anti-vaccine advocacy harder to defend when we get a coronavirus vaccine — The social media platform is siding with scientists to stop the spread of harmful misinformation about the pandemic.

Tweets: @lukasthoms, @mat, @noupside, @benyt, @scottlucas, and @buzzfeednews

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:

JioMart rolls out its online grocery delivery service, including directly sourced farm produce, in dozens of cities in India, after a month of testing in Mumbai — The rationale behind the deluge of dollars flooding into billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio Platforms is beginning to become …

More: Business Standard, Livemint, The Hindu BusinessLine, Moneycontrol, Entrackr, News18, CNBC, and Reuters. Tweets: @ritacyliao

Arjun Kharpal / CNBC:

Report: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are among American tech companies providing web services to blacklisted Chinese surveillance firms like Dahua, Hikvision — - Amazon, Microsoft and Google are among a number of American firms that are providing various web services to blacklisted Chinese surveillance firms, a new report claims.

Tweets: @inteloperator

Eileen Yu / ZDNet:

Singapore mall operator CapitaLand to launch e-commerce and food delivery services on June 1 offering products and services of retailers from its 18 malls — Slated to launch June 1, the e-commerce and food delivery platforms aim to boost sales for retailers in malls operated by Singapore's real estate group CapitaLand.

More: DealStreetAsia, CapitaLand, The Business Times, and The Straits Times

Danny Crichton / TechCrunch:

New York City-based Spruce, whose tech helps buyers, sellers, and lenders digitize paperwork for completing real estate transactions, raises $29M Series B — Real estate is one of those classic industries we always talk about in Silicon Valley: multi-trillion dollars in scale in terms …

More: PR Newswire, HousingWire, and FinSMEs

Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:

Run The World, which helps clients organize and host virtual conferences and events, raises $10.8M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund — Some businesses have boomed, and others have gone bust due to the COVID-19 crisis — without question, live events is one sector that has been hit hardest.

More: TechCrunch, Business Insider, D1SoftballNews.com, Crunchbase News, and Silicon Valley Business …

Lily Hay Newman / Wired:

Researchers discuss ShinyHunters, a hacking group that is hawking what it claims is ~200M stolen records on the dark web since May 1 from at least 13 companies — In the first two weeks of May, they've hit the dark web, hawking 200 million stolen records from over a dozen companies.

More: Threatpost. Tweets: @teachemtechy and @lilyhnewman

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