Techmeme
May 18, 2018, 2:05 AM

Top News

Zack Whittaker / ZDNet:
A bug in the website of LocationSmart, which sells real-time phone location data, let anyone track people's locations across North America without consent  —  The bug allowed one Carnegie Mellon researcher to track anyone's cell phone in real time.  —  A company that collects the real …
Dan Primack / Axios:
Google declines to provide the names of hair salon and restaurant used in controversial Google Duplex demo, or say whether the calls were edited  —  Google made headlines by demonstrating an AI-powered voice assistant that made haircut and restaurant reservations, without betraying that it isn't human.
Wall Street Journal:
Analysis of 1,450 ICOs finds 271 have red flags including plagiarized white papers, fake execs, promised returns; investors poured $1B+ into these 271 offerings  —  A Wall Street Journal analysis of 1,450 cryptocurrency offerings reveals rampant plagiarism, identity theft and promises of improbable returns
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Strategy Analytics: in Q1, Amazon shipped 4M Echos globally, taking 43.6% of the market, as Google shipped 2.4M Home speakers, and Apple shipped 600K HomePods  —  Apple sold an estimated 600,000 HomePod speakers during the first quarter of 2018, according to new estimates shared this morning by Strategy Analytics.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
PayPal confirms it is acquiring Swedish payments company iZettle for $2.2B in an all-cash deal, making it PayPal's biggest-ever transaction  —  PayPal is taking its biggest bet yet on point-of-sale transactions, small businesses, and markets outside of the US, as it looks to raise its game against Square …
Max Chafkin / Bloomberg:
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
Instagram will now let users share posts from their own and public accounts to Stories as a sticker on Android; coming to iOS next week  —  The line between posts and stories is getting even thinner  —  The line between Instagram posts and stories is getting even thinner today.
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook to start testing ads in Stories today in the US, Mexico, and Brazil, says Stories has 150M daily users, defines a user as anyone who watches one story  —  After 14 months of silence since launching, Facebook Stories has finally announced a 150 million daily active user count for its Snapchat Stories clone.

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.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
App Spotlight: Clean Contacts Pro for Zoho CRM  —  App Spotlight brings you hand-picked solutions that enhance your Zoho apps and tools.  Visit Zoho Marketplace to explore all of our apps, integrations …
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

Sources:
Mark Zuckerberg on Muse, Meta's biggest AI bet yet
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Lenny's Podcast:
How we built Grok Bot in a month | Roman Ugarte (SpaceXAI)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Invest Like the Best:
Walter Russell Mead - How America Keeps Winning
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Grit:
The AI Race Has a Leaderboard | Arena CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Big Technology Podcast:
GPT-6 & OpenAI's Comeback, Hugging Face Attack Debate, Ballmer's Scandalous Legacy
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.
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 2:05 AM ET, May 18, 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

Alex Konrad / Forbes:

Earlier Picks

Apple:
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Peter Kafka / Recode: