Techmeme
September 26, 2018, 6:25 PM

Top News

David Marcus / Facebook:
David Marcus repudiates WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton's Forbes interview, defending Facebook and calling Acton's attacks a new standard of “low-class”  —  [Disclaimer: no one at Facebook asked me to post this.  I just had to do it.  And these are my personal views exclusively.]
Parmy Olson / Forbes:
WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton talks about why he gave up $850M to quit Facebook early and his differences with Zuckerberg and Sandberg over monetization  —  hatsApp cofounder Brian Acton, 46, sits in a cafe of the glitzy Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto, California, and the only way you'd guess …
Lucas Matney / TechCrunch:
Oculus announces the standalone Oculus Quest, shipping next spring for $399 with touch controllers and 50+ games at launch  —  Opening up the Oculus Connect 5 keynote with some announcements, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that its newest headset, called Oculus Quest …
U.S. Senate Committee On Commerce …:
Video stream of US Senate hearing on “Examining Safeguards for Consumer Data Privacy” with testimony from AT&T, Amazon, Google, Twitter, Apple, and Charter  —  U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation …
Will Oremus / Slate:
Sources at media outlets say they're seeing little to no ad revenue from Apple News despite huge traffic growth  —  The world's most valuable company is wooing the media with a human touch and a huge audience.  One thing it hasn't delivered: money.  —  In the years leading up to the 2016 U.S. election …
Ashlee Vance / Bloomberg:
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison says the company has raised $245M at a $20B valuation, up from $9B in November 2016  —  The famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist Reid Hoffman often says that his biggest investing whiff was passing on Stripe Inc. As each year ticks by, it's becoming easier …
Austin Carr / Bloomberg:
Iowa's attorney general says Uber will pay $148M to settle claims from all 50 states related to its 2016 data breach that exposed info of 25M+ US users  —  Uber Technologies Inc. will pay $148 million to settle claims related to a large-scale data breach that exposed the personal information …
Anna Hensel / VentureBeat:
Facebook says Facebook and Messenger Stories now have a combined 300M DAUs and it will roll out ads to Facebook Stories globally now and Messenger Stories soon  —  Facebook announced today at a press event in NYC that Stories now has 300 million daily active users across Messenger and Facebook …
Kashmir Hill / Gizmodo:
Study: Facebook lets ads target your account using info given for security purposes, like your phone number, as well as info from your friends' address books  —  Last week, I ran an ad on Facebook that was targeted at a computer science professor named Alan Mislove.
Sean Captain / Fast Company:
Alphabet's DeepMind partners with Unity to accelerate machine learning by building virtual environments to develop and test AI algorithms  —  Intelligent design versus evolution isn't just a divide in people's worldviews.  It's also been a divide in the artificial intelligence community.
More: Engadget and ZDNet
Zach Koch / The Keyword:
Google says that in Chrome 70, coming mid-October, it will allow users to disable linking Google website and Chrome sign-ins  —  We recently made a change to simplify the way Chrome handles sign-in.  Now, when you sign into any Google website, you're also signed into Chrome with the same account.
Greg Bensinger / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: late 2017 probe of Cameron Poetzscher, a top dealmaker at Uber, found troubling behavior like sexually charged comments; he was censured, then promoted  —  Uber gave Cameron Poetzscher a warning, reduced his bonus and mandated sensitivity coaching after investigation found pattern of sexually suggestive comments
Kim Zetter / New York Times:
Two years after many voter-registration networks were penetrated by hackers, voting infrastructure in US remains largely unchanged, despite officials' warnings  —  As the midterms approach, America's electronic voting systems are more vulnerable than ever.  Why isn't anyone trying to fix them?
CoinDesk:
Crypto mining company Bitmain files for Hong Kong IPO; draft filing shows $2.8B in revenue as of June 30 and $422.05M raised in funding round that ended Aug. 7  —  Bitmain, the Beijing-based cryptocurrency mining giant, has officially filed an application to go public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX).

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