Techmeme
March 21, 2018, 2:00 PM

Top News

Jason Abbruzzese / NBC News:
Facebook confirms Mark Zuckerberg will speak in the next 24 hours on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, after initially being focused on how to fix the problem  —  #WheresZuck had become a question in the past couple days  —  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will speak publicly in the next 24 hours with a …
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Brian Acton, who cofounded WhatsApp, which was acquired by Facebook for $16B, tweeted “It is time. #deletefacebook”  —  Facebook bought his app for $16 billion  —  In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $16 billion, making its co-founders — Jan Koum and Brian Acton — very wealthy men.
Wired:
With the storm over user data misuse intensifying into a hurricane, Facebook now faces several vexing questions about its opaque privacy practices  —  Two weeks ago, Facebook learned that The New York Times, Guardian, and Observer were working on blockbuster stories based on interviews with a man named Christopher Wylie.
Matthew Yglesias / Vox:
Zuckerberg and other execs are in denial about Facebook: it's not a force for good, having helped destroy industries and break societies and should be shuttered  —  It's not just about privacy; its core function makes people lonely and sad.  —  Facebook is enmeshed in another controversy …
Washington Post:
Taylor Hatmaker / TechCrunch:
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Sources: Google is buying Lytro, the imaging startup that uses its light field tech in VR, for about $40M; one source describes deal as an “asset sale”  —  Last week, Google showed off a new app to display immersive photography in virtual reality, and a multi-camera technique for capturing it …
David Meyer / Fortune:
The European Commission proposes a 3% tax on EU revenues of companies with global annual revenues of €750M+, like Google, Facebook, and Amazon  —  The European Commission wants to see big tech firms pay a 3% tax on some of their revenues.  This is a major break from the traditional way of calculating tax based on profits.
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
15-year-old hacker exposes vulnerability in popular “tamper-proof” Ledger hardware cryptocurrency wallets that have sold by the millions  —  Backdoor allows attacker to recover private keys stored on Ledger hardware wallets.  —  For years, executives at France-based Ledger …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Apple executive Jimmy Iovine will transition into a consulting role in August and step back from daily involvement with Apple Music  —  The music executive and Beats co-founder will step back from daily involvement with Apple's streaming-music business
Johana Bhuiyan / Recode:
Travis Kalanick becoming CEO of City Storage Systems, which focuses on repurposing real estate, and says his new fund is acquiring a $150M controlling interest  —  The company was formerly called CloudKitchens and was led by Diego Berdakin, an early Uber investor.  —  Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has found his new job.
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Google's global head of music, Lyor Cohen, says YouTube will start putting more ads in between music videos to encourage subscriptions to upcoming music service  —  It's a cultural change for a company that was built on free  —  YouTube will increase the number of ads that some users …
Rita El Khoury / Android Police:
Amazon's in-home delivery service app Key adds fingerprint authentication support on Android  —  Amazon's Key in-home delivery service was announced last October and its cameras and smart door locks became available in November.  Since then, Amazon has been able to use Key to place …

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Earlier Picks

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