Techmeme
September 21, 2016, 4:35 PM

Top News

Financial Times:
Sources: Apple in talks with UK luxury carmaker and F1 team owner McLaren for a full takeover or strategic investment; McLaren's valuation is said to be £1B+  —  Apple has approached McLaren Technology Group, the British supercar engineer and Formula One team owner, about a potential acquisition …
New York Times:
Sources: Apple in talks to acquire Lit Motors, an SF startup that makes a self-balancing motorbike; Apple has previously hired several Lit Motors engineers  —  Apple, which laid off dozens of employees from its secretive car project this month, is increasingly seeking help from outside companies with expertise in vehicles.
Benjamin Zhang / Business Insider:
McLaren statement on Apple report: “there's no takeover, no strategic investment”  —  On Wednesday, the Financial Times reported that Apple has approached McLaren over a potential takeover or strategic investment.  McLaren has officially denied that anything is happening.
Nathan Ingraham / Engadget:
Google launches Allo messaging app with Smart Reply and Google Assistant for iOS and Android  —  If you're going to unveil a new messaging app, it had better do something unique.  At this point, finding a place amongst entrenched options like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and iMessage is not an easy task.
Russell Brandom / The Verge:
Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature, will store all non-incognito messages by default  —  The app will log conversations by default after all  —  When Allo was announced at Google's I/O conference earlier this year, the messaging app was presented as a step forward for privacy.
Kurt Wagner / Recode:
Twitter will live stream Bloomberg's coverage of all three presidential debates, split revenue from ads displayed during pre-debate and post-debate coverage  —  Hillary versus Trump, live on Twitter.  —  When Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump square off in their first nationally televised presidential debate …
Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch:
Hands-on with iPhone 7 Plus' Portrait mode beta: works very well in many instances, but currently has issues distinguishing fine lines, wires, and more  —  One of the most talked about features of the iPhone 7 at launch was the new Portrait mode.  —  It's a software feature that used …
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to spend $3B over 10 years to find disease cures, starting with funding for research and tool building at new UCSF “Biohub” project  —  Starting with a $600 million “Biohub”  —  The philanthropic initiative founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Netflix CFO David Wells says company wants original content to make up 50% of its catalog within a few years, is currently “one-third to halfway” toward target  —  Netflix is driving toward having half the content on its streaming service be original productions over the next few years …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Tumblr adds support for Live Photos on the web and open-sources the tool for doing so  —  Tumblr today is bringing Live Photos to the web version of its service, while also rolling out tools that will allow other web developers to do the same.  The company has released an open source JavaScript library …
Matthew Hughes / The Next Web:
Researchers find North Korea has only 28 TLDs on .kp domain after misconfigured nameservers allowed TL;DR project to obtain all the top-level DNS data  —  North Korea is the most repressive, secretive state in the world.  There's no free press, no independent media, and scarce few people have access to the Internet.
Jason Snell / Six Colors:
macOS Sierra's Optimized Storage iCloud syncing for Desktop and Documents folders is buggy and may not suit everyone's workflow  —  So that's it for the era of the big X. Version 10.12 of the operating system that runs the Mac is here, and with it, a new/old name: macOS.

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Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: