Techmeme
March 21, 2018, 5:55 PM

Top News

Mark Zuckerberg:
Zuckerberg says Cambridge Analytica breached Facebook's trust, which caused Facebook to break users' trust, and vows to prevent it from happening again  —  I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation — including the steps we've already taken and our next steps to address this important issue.
Facebook:
Facebook to review all apps that had extended data access in 2014 and prior, audit suspicious ones, inform users about misuse, revoke permissions of unused apps  —  Protecting people's information is the most important thing we do at Facebook.  What happened with Cambridge Analytica was a breach of Facebook's trust.
Matthew Yglesias / Vox:
Zuckerberg and other executives are in denial: Facebook is 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 …
Paul Ford / Bloomberg:
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Washington Post:
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.
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
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 …
Colin Lecher / The Verge:
Senate votes 97-2 to advance the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, which was initially opposed by tech giants; Trump will now likely sign it into law  —  The Senate has voted 97-2 to advance the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, a controversial initiative meant to crack down on sex trafficking on the internet.
Raymond Wong / Mashable:
Privacy bug in iOS lets Siri read out hidden content from third-party app notifications on lock screens  —  On iOS 11, Apple introduced a new way to protect user privacy by letting you hide the contents of your notifications on your iPhone's lock screen until you unlock the device with Touch ID or Face ID.
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Sources: Michael Coates, Twitter's chief information security officer since 2015, is leaving to start his own company; interim replacement is Joseph Camilleri  —  Michael Coates joined Twitter in 2015  —  Twitter's chief information security officer is leaving the company, sources familiar with the matter have told The Verge.
Simon Shuster / TIME:
Investigation finds Russian businessmen and senior Kremlin advisers secretly helped Venezuela launch its Petro cryptocurrency, aimed at eroding US sanctions  —  President Donald Trump may not have realized on Monday that his executive order would step on Russia's toes.
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 …
More: The Verge and Ubergizmo
Salvador Rodriguez / Reuters:
Slack is building a safety engineering team that will develop methods to help reduce outages; since April 2017, Slack has had 40 days with outages  —  Collaboration software provider Slack Technologies Inc is building a safety engineering team that will develop methods to help reduce …
Thanks:@sal19
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google announces new security features for Google Cloud Platform and G Suite, including new DDoS protections, dashboard, and increased data transparency  —  The enterprise is one area where Google is committing vast resources in order to gain a foothold in the lucrative market occupied by Amazon and Microsoft.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cape:
Most carriers track everything.  Cape doesn't.  —  Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more.  Switch today and get 29% off for life.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
Zoho Notebook: The free iPad note-taking app every student needs  —  If you're a student with an iPad, you already have one of the best note-taking devices in your hands.  The question is, does your app actually do it justice?
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

The Upstarts Podcast:
Abridge's Shiv Rao: The Doctor Founder Taking On Microsoft In Healthcare AI
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
OpenAI's Bots Break Containment and Hack Hugging Face Autonomously — With Alex Stamos
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Great Chat:
Too big to laugh: how tech lost its sense of humor
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Substack Wants To Become A Social Network; Beehiiv Wants To Stay Invisible
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Training Data:
Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming 'Dark Factory' Where Software Builds Itself
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 5:55 PM ET, March 21, 2018.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Melanie Ehrenkranz / Gizmodo:

Earlier Picks