Techmeme
January 2, 2018, 10:30 AM

Top News

Brian Heater / TechCrunch:
Smart lock maker Otto, which unveiled its first product in August 2017, suspends operations  —  Otto showed the world its digital lock in August.  Four months later, the company has suspended operations.  Hardware is hard.  It's a cliche for a reason.  —  The company made the decision …
Fred Wilson / AVC:
Three interrelated macro themes dominated this year in tech: the breakout of crypto, beginning of the end of white male dominance, and the backlash against tech  —  As has become my practice, I celebrate the end of a year and the start of a new one here at AVC with back to back posts focusing …
BBC:
Germany starts enforcing law under which social networks will face fines of up to €50M if they fail to remove hate speech, fake news, and illegal material  —  Germany is set to start enforcing a law that demands social media sites move quickly to remove hate speech, fake news and illegal material.
ProPublica:
Study shows Facebook's hate speech rules are unevenly enforced, with the company agreeing its censors made mistakes on 22 of 49 posts submitted for explanation  —  We asked Facebook about its handling of 49 posts that might be deemed offensive.  The company acknowledged that its content reviewers had made the wrong call on 22 of them.
Freedom to Tinker:
How third-party scripts on websites exploit a flaw in browsers' built-in password managers to identify and track users  —  In this second installment of the No Boundaries series, we show how a long-known vulnerability in browsers' built-in password managers is abused by third-party scripts for tracking on more than a thousand sites.
Justin McCurry / The Guardian:
YouTube star Logan Paul sparked outrage by posting a video of a dead body of an alleged suicide victim in a Japanese forest; the video was later removed  —  American YouTuber joked with friends on film after coming across the apparent suicide victim  —  The celebrity YouTuber Logan Paul …
Newley Purnell / Wall Street Journal:
Alibaba's UC Browser, with 430M+ users worldwide, leads in emerging markets with low-end smartphones, with 51% of India's mobile browser market vs Chrome's 30%  —  Alibaba's UC Browser is dominating in emerging markets with lower-end smartphones  —  JAKARTA, Indonesia …
Theodore Schleifer / Recode:
Telegram, citing ToS, suspends public channel that incited violent anti-government protests in Iran; Telegram is a major platform with ~40M users in Iran  —  “There are lines one shouldn't cross,” says the CEO of the popular messaging app.  —  The executives of Telegram …
Ben Kentish / The Independent:
Hiroko Tabuchi / New York Times:
Groups skeptical of climate change are gaming Google's largely automated ad systems to promote misleading claims that reject established climate science  —  Groups that reject established climate science can use the search engine's advertising business to their advantage …
Ina Fried / Axios:
Apple makes $29 iPhone battery replacement price effective immediately, rather than in late January, but warns initial supplies of some batteries may be limited  —  Aiming to further stem controversy over how it handles aging iPhone batteries, Apple said Saturday that its lower replacement price …
Kyle Samani / Forbes:
Ripple may be a great blockchain-based tech for banks, but the valuation of its XRP token reflects the unlikely hope it becomes a global reserve cryptocurrency  —  In August, the hedge I cofounded, Multicoin Capital, published an analysis of XRP, the native token of the Ripple network.
Evelyn Cheng / CNBC:

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