Techmeme
December 27, 2016, 8:35 PM

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Billy Steele / Engadget:
Report: police sought Echo data with warrant in murder case; Amazon declined to share the data Echo logged on servers but did provide suspect's account details  —  Amazon's Echo devices and its virtual assistant are meant to help find answers by listening for your voice commands.
Martin Brinkmann / gHacks Technology News:
Open source cross-platform video transcoder HandBrake updated to version 1.0.0 after 13 years of development  —  HandBrake 1.0.0, a new version of the popular open source cross-platform video converter, was released on December 24, 2016.  —  I reviewed HandBrake for the first time in the year 2007 …
Natt Garun / The Verge:
Facebook's Safety Check in Bangkok, Thailand falsely triggered by fake news reports about a bomb explosion, was deactivated after about an hour  —  There was no bomb scare in Thailand  —  Facebook got fooled by its own algorithm.  Today, the social network falsely activated its Safety Check feature …
Flurry Blog:
44% of smartphone, tablet activations during week leading up to Christmas were iOS, down 5% YoY, 21% were Samsung devices; Pixel, Pixel XL not among top sellers  —  By: Chris Klotzbach, Director at Flurry and Lali Kesiraju, Marketing and Analytics Manager at Flurry
Aaron Tilley / Forbes:
Apple publishes an artificial intelligence paper for the first time, after recently promising to open up its AI research  —  Earlier this month, Apple made a splash when it told the artificial intelligence research community that the secretive company would start publishing AI papers of its own.
John Callaham / Android Authority:
T-Mobile rolls out update to Samsung Galaxy Note7 phones that prevents battery from charging, becoming the first major US carrier to do so  —  Samsung's previously announced plan to kill the battery in the remaining active Galaxy Note 7 smartphones in the US has begun.
David Streitfeld / New York Times:
Inside Snopes' increasingly prominent fact-checking operation, which added 12 staffers a couple of years ago and saw record ~2.5M uniques the day after election  —  SAN DIEGO — The last line of defense against the torrent of half-truths, untruths and outright fakery that make up so much of …
Wall Street Journal:
World's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater, is building an algorithmic model to recreate founder's staff-management style, led by ex-IBM Watson's David Ferrucci  —  Bridgewater wants day-to-day management—hiring, firing, decision-making—to be guided by software that doles out instructions
Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:
Obama urges the end of the “dual hat” arrangement where US Cyber Command and NSA are led by the same person  —  With weeks to go in his tenure, President Obama on Friday moved to end the controversial “dual-hat” arrangement under which the National Security Agency …
More: Techdirt

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