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October 15, 2018, 7:00 AM
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| Megan Molteni / Wired: |
Researchers: 60% of Americans of European descent can be identified via public DNA databases, regardless of whether they've submitted their own DNA data or not — IN 2013, A young computational biologist named Yaniv Erlich shocked the research world by showing it was possible to unmask …
More:
New York Times, Science, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, NPR, Gizmodo, The Verge, Vox, BGR, Silicon Republic, and BuzzFeed News
Tweets: @ensembl, @alfonslopeztena, @seldo, @sciencemagazine, @carnage4life, and @latimes
| Alex Blumberg / New York Magazine: |
Interview with former Groupon CEO and founder Andrew Mason on how he built and scaled the company, passed on Yahoo and Google acquisition offers, and got fired — Andrew Mason started Groupon ten years ago. He was a graduate student in his mid-20s, making money on the side by building websites.
Tweets: @andrewchen, @johnpletz, @joshuanguyen, @monstro, and @intelligencer
| Alison Griswold / Quartz: |
How Uber's team of economists tests new features and incentives, writes highly-cited academic papers, and provides talking points for public policy initiatives — It's hard to explain just how much economists love Uber. — Economists love Uber like a mother loves her child.
Tweets: @jedkolko, @noahpinion, @frankpasquale, @greglinden, @timoreilly, @alexgoldmark, and @veenadubal
| Robert Evans / bellingcat: |
A look at how fascist activists discover their ideology on the internet, with 39 of the 75 individuals studied crediting content they found on YouTube — The vast majority of domestic terror attacks in the U.S. are carried out by white supremacist organizations.
Tweets: @profcarroll and @zeynep
| Erica Klarreich / Quanta Magazine: |
Urmila Mahadev, a UC Berkeley grad student, solves the fundamental problem of finding a protocol by which a classical computer can verify a quantum computation — Urmila Mahadev spent eight years in graduate school solving one of the most basic questions in quantum computation …
Tweets: @quantamagazine, @phabcd, @chelskilittle, @lbnlphysics, @quantamagazine, and @indianinterest
| Chainalysis: |
Study analyzing 32 biggest bitcoin holders, known as “whales”, suggests they may be stabilizing the market rather than destabilizing it and driving volatility — New data shows that bitcoin's largest holders are a diverse group that may be stabilizing, rather than destabilizing, the market.
Tweets: @philip_gradwell and @sharkcianews
| Mack DeGeurin / New York Magazine: |
How facial recognition is being used to monitor animals: detecting sickness in salmon, gauging diet of cattle, protecting elephants from poachers, and more — Facial recognition technology has some serious, persistent issues. These were clearly shown earlier this year when Amazon's …
Tweets: @nymag
| Ian Hathaway: |
Since 2015, first VC financings declined 25% to 40% annually for startups operating in sectors exposed to the core activities of Google, Facebook, and Amazon — UPDATE: A quick note of clarity, since many readers are misinterpreting (ie, not fully reading) the analysis done here.| Aditya Kalra / Reuters: |
As India takes a firm stance on data localization and works on a data protection framework, two US senators write to encourage “light touch” regulation — NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Two U.S. senators have called on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to soften India's stance on data localization …
More:
Engadget and PYMNTS.com
| Thomas Brewster / Forbes: |
How criminals accessed TransUnion's TLO mass-monitoring tech via a client's rogue employee to steal identities, and how they were caught using Nest cam footage — n a June day last year, a skinny, dreadlocked 29-year-old rapper known as Tony Da Boss lay in bed in a redbrick apartment … | Megan Rose Dickey / TechCrunch: |
SmileDirectClub, which ships teeth-aligners directly to users, with dental professionals monitoring patient progress remotely, raises $380M at a $3.2B valuation — SmileDirectClub, the at-home teeth-straightening startup, has just raised $380 million at a $3.2 billion valuation, the company announced today.
More:
CNBC, GlobeNewswire News Room, and Bloomberg
| Paul Sawers / VentureBeat: |
MongoDB agrees to acquire cloud database provider MLab for $68M to strengthen its Atlas database-as-a-service offering — MongoDB, the New York-based company behind the popular eponymous open source NoSQL database, has acquired San Francisco cloud database provider MLab (styled “mLab").Sponsor Posts
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Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.Featured Podcasts
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Big Technology Podcast:
AI Is Upending Law. Is That A Sign For The Rest Of Us? — With Melia Russell
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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.
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