Techmeme
December 22, 2018, 2:50 AM

Top News

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 trust to the point that people 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.
Slack:
Slack apologizes, says it has restored access to most of the accounts it has mistakenly blocked while trying to comply with US trade sanctions  —  Two days ago, we updated our system for applying location information to comply with U.S. trade embargoes and economic sanctions regulations.
Ryan Mac / BuzzFeed News:
A timeline of Facebook's scandals in 2018 lists 31 entries, showing the company faced a major problem, on average, every 12 days this year  —  Mark Zuckerberg began the year promising that he would fix Facebook.  He didn't, and 2018 has only presented more problems.
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 …
Kaitlin Thaney / Wikimedia Foundation:
Wikimedia says Facebook, which uses Wikipedia content to provide information on article sources in the News Feed, has donated $1M to the Wikimedia Endowment  —  We are pleased to announce that Facebook, one of the world's leading social networking platforms, has given $1 million to the Wikimedia Endowment …

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Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed News:

Earlier Picks

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CNBC: