Techmeme
May 19, 2016, 11:30 AM

Top News

Aaron Aupperlee / Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
Uber officially confirms testing self-driving Ford Fusion cars in Pittsburgh  —  Uber is testing its fleet of self-driving Ford Fusion cars on the streets, bridges and hills of Pittsburgh, the ride-sharing company confirmed for the first time Wednesday.  —  The San Francisco-based firm …
Norm Jouppi / Google Cloud Platform Blog:
Google announces it has built a Tensor Processing Unit, a custom chip for machine learning and tailored for TensorFlow  —  Posted by Norm Jouppi, Distinguished Hardware Engineer, Google  —  Machine learning provides the underlying oomph to many of Google's most-loved applications.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Google turns Firebase into a unified platform for developers, with analytics, new notification system, and more; a free plan is now available  —  Google offers a plethora of cloud services that mobile developers can use to power their apps.  With Firebase, which it acquired in 2014 …
Apple:
Apple opens office in Hyderabad, India to develop maps for Apple products, will create up to 4,000 jobs  —  Apple® today announced the opening of a new office in Hyderabad that will focus on development of Maps for Apple products, including iPhone®, iPad®, Mac® and Apple Watch®.
Lawrence Abrams / Bleeping Computer:
TeslaCrypt ransomware shuts down, releases master decryption key for victims  —  In surprising end to TeslaCrypt, the developers shut down their ransomware and released the master decryption key.  Over the past few weeks, an analyst for ESET had noticed that the developers of TeslaCrypt …
Jacob Long / Android Police:
Google unveils Family Library for Google Play purchases, will allow apps to be shared among six people, likely beginning July 2  —  We knew it was coming eventually, but just before the Google I/O keynote began, Google updated its developer documentation with more details about Family Library.
Stephen Hall / 9to5Google:
Android apps and the Google Play Store are coming to Chrome OS  —  It looks like there's a little tidbit of information that might have been originally planned for the keynote (pulled because of time restraints, maybe?).  According to a session description now on the Google I/O website …
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Michael Crider / Android Police:
Xiaomi announces the Mi Box, a 4K Android TV set-top box with Bluetooth voice remote, coming to US soon  —  You might have noticed that there aren't a lot of Android TV boxes around.  Aside from the original Nexus Player, the much-recommended NVIDIA SHIELD, and the generally regrettable Razer Forge TV …
Tim Cushing / Techdirt:
Federal Judge Says Internet Archive's Wayback Machine A Perfectly Legitimate Source Of Evidence  —  Those of us who dwell on the internet already know the Internet Archive's “Wayback Machine” is a useful source of evidence.  For one, it showed that the bogus non-disparagement clause KlearGear used …
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Google announces Google Home, an always-listening small speaker to compete with Amazon Echo, coming out later this year, price unknown  —  For the past year and a half, the tech world has been recovering from Amazon's surprise announcement of the Echo.  Now, Google is finally doing what everybody wanted it to do: release a competitor.
Matthew Lynley / TechCrunch:
CNET:
Ben Popper / The Verge:
Google reveals plans for new VR headset and motion controller slated for this fall, to be part of Daydream, Google's VR platform that's baked into Android N  —  At its annual I/O developer conference today, Google is showing off a reference design for a new virtual reality headset that builds …

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Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: