Techmeme
November 15, 2018, 3:30 PM

Top News

Facebook:
Facebook responds to the NYT exposé, lists “number of inaccuracies” in the story, and denies it knew about Russian activity as early as spring of 2016  —  Yesterday The New York Times published an article about the past two years at Facebook.  There are a number of inaccuracies in the story, including:
New York Times:
Interviews with more than 50 people show how Facebook stumbled in dealing with multiple crises, which Zuckerberg and Sandberg initially tried to obscure  —  Sheryl Sandberg was seething.  —  Inside Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
New York Times:
Facebook has ended its relationship with Definers Public Affairs, the consulting firm which cast George Soros as a force behind Facebook's critics  —  SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook has ended its relationship with a Washington-based consulting firm, Definers Public Affairs, which spread disparaging information …
Alistair Barr / Bloomberg:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook will create an external oversight committee in 2019 to handle some content policy decisions  —  Facebook doesn't want to be the arbiter of decency when it comes to content policy decisions, similar to how it looked to third-party fact checkers rather than becoming an arbiter of truth.
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Google Maps is being overburdened with so many features and design changes that it is becoming difficult to just get directions in the app  —  Yelp must be thrilled  —  Earlier today, 9to5Google pointed us to a blog post from Google announcing a new feature for Google Maps: messaging businesses.
Brian Fung / Washington Post:
FCC gives SpaceX permission to deploy over 7,000 Starlink internet satellites, as part of a full network of 12,000  —  Federal regulators are allowing entrepreneur Elon Musk to use an expanded range of wireless airwaves for his plan to deliver cheap, high-speed Internet access — from space.
Steven Bertoni / Forbes:
Airtable, which wants to make database management mainstream by using drag and drop, raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation  —  n the frenetic world of tech, where the ruling ethos is to move fast and break things, Howie Liu moves at a glacial pace.  With Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas, he launched Airtable in 2013.
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
Raspberry Pi Foundation announces $25 Pi 3 Model A+, with a quad-core 1.4GHz CPU but less RAM and USB ports than the $35 Model B+  —  The $25 Pi 3 Model A+  —  The Raspberry Pi Foundation's goal is to make computing as cheap and accessible as possible, so today, it's introducing …
Tom Spring / Threatpost:
Hackers breach iPhone X, Galaxy S9, and Xiaomi Mi6 and earn $325K for exposing 18 exploits at the Pwn2Own Tokyo 2018 contest  —  Three major mobile phone models - the Samsung Galaxy S9, iPhone X and the Xiaomi Mi6 - failed to survive the hacker onslaught at this year's Pwn2Own Tokyo 2018.
Khari Johnson / VentureBeat:
Citrix says it acquired Sapho, which makes micro-apps for team collaboration apps like Slack, for $200M in an all cash deal; Sapho has raised $27.9M  —  Citrix Systems today announced it acquired Sapho in an all-cash $200 million deal, a Citrix spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.
More: TechCrunch

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Earlier Picks

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Vlad Savov / The Verge: