Techmeme
March 20, 2017, 7:35 PM

Top News

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources shed light on Apple's augmented reality team, which is working on several products including AR glasses and AR camera features for the iPhone  —  CEO Tim Cook is betting on augmented reality, a cousin of VR that he believes will keep his company on top and may even supplant the iPhone.
Jon Ostrower / CNNMoney:
Sources: US to temporarily ban some electronics, excluding phones, from cabins on certain flights from Middle Eastern countries and Africa to US  —  Airlines that fly from certain countries in the Middle East and Africa to the U.S. must require passengers to check in almost all electronic devices rather …
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
At least 318 Cisco switch products are vulnerable to flaw that was found upon examination of WikiLeaks' Vault 7 files; no patch is currently available  —  Bug relies on telnet protocol used by hardware on internal networks.  —  Cisco Systems said that more than 300 models of switches …
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Adding to recent departures, Uber vice president of maps and business platform, Brian McClendon, plans to leave amicably on March 28  —  The number of executive departures from Uber is growing.  —  Jeff Jones, Uber's president of ride sharing, has left the company after just six months, Uber said on Sunday.
Kara Swisher / Recode:
Rolfe Winkler / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: SoftBank has scrapped a planned $100M investment in Andy Rubin's Essential Products smartphone startup, which would have valued it at $1B  —  Masayoshi Son's decision to scrap deal with creator of Android software reflects unpredictable style  —  SoftBank Group Corp. scrapped …
Bloomberg:
Vodafone's India unit and Idea Cellular to merge, creating the largest carrier in the country, valued at about $23B with nearly 400M customers  —  Enlarged company has valuation of about $23.2 billion  —  Idea shares fall after initially surging in Mumbai trading
Charlie Warzel / BuzzFeed:
How Techmeme continues to set the agenda for influential tech readers, without chasing scale or adopting the trappings of most media firms  —  Gabe Rivera was halfway through his lamb gyro when it became clear he'd been spotted.  It was the middle of the lunch rush at a bustling upscale food court …
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Samsung unveils its context-aware ‘Bixby’ AI assistant ahead of Galaxy S8 launch  —  We're barely a week away from the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and among the phone's unique hardware features, Samsung is also looking to introduce some new software tricks, spearheaded by the Bixby AI assistant.

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Pete Rizzo / CoinDesk: