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December 21, 2018, 7:20 PM
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| Jeffrey Dastin / Reuters: |
Sources describe how Amazon's efforts to make Alexa a better communicator through its Alexa Prize competition led to a hack and chats about sex and murder — SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Millions of users of Amazon's Echo speakers have grown accustomed to the soothing strains of Alexa … | Will Oremus / Slate: |
Facebook has forfeited our trust to the point that we see nefarious motives in any misstep, as some overblown reactions to Spotify and Netflix integrations show — Facebook may or may not have lost its handle on our data. But it has definitely lost its handle on the public narrative—and the benefit of the doubt.
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Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post, Techdirt, Vox, The Parallax, Techonomy, BestVPN.com, Motherboard, The Guardian, Infosecurity.US, NPR, InvestorPlace, Adweek, TidBITS, CNBC, CSO, and Silicon Valley Business …
Tweets: @netflix, @mathewi, @zittrain, @zittrain, @zittrain, @willoremus, @kylepope, @bigalittlea, @benadida, @facebook, @matthewstoller, @vickerysec, and @alexstamos
| Nick Statt / The Verge: |
Epic Games is facing lawsuits over Fortnite dance emotes, real-life dance moves used in the game, raising questions about whether dance moves are copyrightable — Epic Games' Fortnite is the biggest game on the planet right now, but one of its biggest sources of revenue — the ubiquitous dance …
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Tweets: @mathewi, @fortninety, @mattmcgee, @alancayce, @nickstatt, @undoomed, and @eugenewei
| Randy Nelson / Sensor Tower Blog: |
Sensor Tower: Apple's App Store had 164 publishers earn their first $1M in 2018, up ~15% YoY, nearly double the 88 on Google Play, which was up 24% YoY — Apple has long led its primary rival in the app economy in terms of monetization on its App Store, consistently generating close to twice … | Bloomberg: |
Google Payment receives an e-money license in Lithuania, enabling it to process payments, issue e-money, and handle electronic money wallets throughout the EU — Google Payment, a company owned by Alphabet Inc., obtained an e-money license in Lithuania, joining a growing number of fintech firms …
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9to5Google
| Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch: |
Blind, an anonymous chat app used by staff at companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Uber, left one database server exposed from Nov. 1 to Dec. 19 — One of the company's servers was exposed without a password for weeks. — Thousands of people trusted Blind, an app-based …
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Engadget, Mashable, AppleInsider, Gizmodo, archive.li, and Notes from Silicon Valley
Tweets: @zackwhittaker, @tayhatmaker, @imeluny, @tayhatmaker, @alevskey, @carnage4life, @martinsfp, @dangillmor, and @caseynewton
| Sarah E. Needleman / Wall Street Journal: |
Chat app Discord has raised a $150M round at a $2.05B valuation and says it now has ~200M users, more than four times what it had a year ago — The company plans to spend $150 million to move into new areas, including selling videogames online — Discord Inc., which makes chat software … | New York Times: |
JD.com founder and CEO Richard Liu will not be charged with sexual assault following rape allegation in August, prosecutors in Minneapolis say — Richard Liu, the Chinese billionaire accused of rape nearly four months ago by a young Chinese student at the University of Minnesota … | Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed News: |
Indian government downplays its order that seemingly authorizes 10 government agencies to monitor, intercept, and decrypt data on all computers in the country — India's Ministry of Home Affairs, a federal government authority that controls the country's internal security …
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VentureBeat, The Hindu, Times of India, NDTV Gadgets 360, The Wire, The Hindu, News18, The Indian Express, Livemint, Firstpost, MediaNama, and Firstpost
| Jon Russell / TechCrunch: |
Sources: SoftBank's Vision Fund is planning to invest $1B in Singapore-based ride-hailing service Grab; source: investment could be as much as $1.5B — SoftBank's Vision Fund is set to continue its recent spree of investments in Asian tech unicorns. The mega fund — which is targeted at $100 billion — is planning| Paul Thurrott / Thurrott: |
Sources: Microsoft is planning to release 4K webcams in 2019, including one with Windows Hello-based authentication and one that is enterprise-focused — It's been several years since Microsoft has released a webcam. But two separate sources tell me that the firm is plotting a return to this market in 2019.
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Windows Central, Neowin, and MSPoweruser
| South China Morning Post: |
China is resuming video game approvals after a nine-month freeze; China's gaming industry expected to have its slowest growth this year in at least a decade — - Amid the regulatory hiatus, China's gaming industry suffered its slowest growth in at least a decade
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Reuters, TechCrunch, Gamasutra, Engadget, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, GamesIndustry.biz, and Bloomberg
| Josh Smith / Reuters: |
Woowa Bros, South Korea's largest food delivery startup, raises $320M at a valuation of $2.6B for international expansion and to develop autonomous robots — SEOUL (Reuters) - The operator of South Korea's largest food delivery app has secured a $320 million investment from Hillhouse Capital …
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pulsenews.co.kr, The Spoon, THE INVESTOR, and Wall Street Journal
| Sarah Krouse / Wall Street Journal: |
Sprint to pay $300M in a settlement with New York AG for failing to collect $100M+ in state and local taxes between 2005 and 2014 on some of its wireless plans — Carrier didn't collect proper taxes on some wireless plans for nearly a decade, New York attorney general saysSponsor Posts
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Cloudflare:
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