Techmeme
December 16, 2018, 12:25 PM

Top News

TMZ.com:
Colin Kroll, the CEO, co-founder of HQ Trivia and co-founder of Vine, has died at 35; police source says a drug overdose is suspected  —  Colin Kroll, the CEO and co-founder of HQ Trivia has died of an apparent drug overdose ... TMZ has learned.  —  Law enforcement sources tell TMZ …
Julie Verhage / Bloomberg:
Robinhood deletes tweets about launching checking and savings accounts, scrubs the page from its website, and now calls the offering a “cash management” program  —  After a backlash around the marketing of its newest product, Robinhood Financial LLC has rebranded the service …
Julie Verhage / Bloomberg:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
PlanetScale, a database-as-a-service startup based on tech that helped scale YouTube, emerges from stealth, had raised $3M seed from tech luminaries last April  —  Database legends emerge with a new startup  —  When the former CTOs of YouTube, Facebook and Dropbox seed fund a database startup …
More: PlanetScale.  Thanks:@katsuery
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Latticework, which is working on a consumer focused $550 NAS device called Amber and a cloud backup platform, has raised a $13M seed round  —  It seems nary a week goes by without a breach that compromises millions of personal files.  On Monday, Google revealed that it will shut down its social network …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Tencent's Blade security team finds SQLite vulnerability that affects thousands of apps, including Google Home and Chromium open-source browser engine  —  New ‘Magellan’ vulnerability will haunt the app ecosystem for years to come.  —  A security vulnerability in the massively popular …
Aisha Hassan / Quartz:
Profile of MindGeek, which owns 9 of the top 15 porn sites worldwide, has 125M visits per day, and whose bandwidth use exceeds that of Facebook or Amazon  —  The biggest and perhaps best source of data about what people like to watch on the internet and what they would pay for doesn't come …
Brian Merchant / Gizmodo:
The recklessness of Uber and Tesla in their development of autonomous cars risks alienating a public already wary of self-driving vehicles  —  Autonomous vehicles were supposed to make driving safer, and they may yet—some of the more optimistic research indicates self-driving cars could save tens …
Tweets: @nigelcameron
Klint Finley / Wired:
A year after FCC's vote to repeal net neutrality rules, there have been no big changes in how ISPs and mobile carriers provide their services  —  IT'S BEEN ONE year since the Federal Communications Commission voted to gut its net neutrality rules.  The good news is that the internet isn't drastically different than it was before.
More: Hit & Run.  Tweets: @wired
Jeanine Poggi / Ad Age:
Hulu is launching a new private programmatic marketplace for advertisers to buy its on-demand and TV inventory; the marketplace won't replace upfront deals  —  Hulu is further automating advertising on the streaming platform with a new private programmatic marketplace.

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Earlier Picks

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Reuters: