Techmeme
January 8, 2019, 2:50 PM

Top News

Joseph Cox / Motherboard:
Investigation shows how easy and affordable obtaining cellphone customers' real-time location data can be, as T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T peddle it to middlemen  —  T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers' location data, and that data is ending up in the hands …
Andrew Ross Sorkin / New York Times:
Lambda School, which trains students online to be software engineers in exchange for a share of future income, raises $30M Series B from Bedrock, GV, YC, others  —  Income Sharing Agreements are gaining the attention of higher education and Wall Street.  One early success story is getting a boost from venture capital.
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Apple erred on China and “S” cycles, XR, and growth strategies, but reasons for optimism remain as headwinds, like cheap battery swaps, will fade  —  As rare as last week's Apple revenue warning from CEO Tim Cook may have been — the company last issued a revenue warning in June 2002 …
Sam Kim / Bloomberg:
Samsung forecasts decline in Q4 operating profit to ~$9.65B, below analyst estimates of ~$12.4B, due to weak memory chip demand and competition in smartphones  —  Samsung Electronics Co. posted fourth-quarter profit below estimates as demand for memory chips slumps amid deteriorating relations between the U.S. and China.
Axios:
Amazon is quietly piloting a program for brands like Folgers to pay to send free samples to Amazon users, who are likely to enjoy them based on order history  —  Amazon is quietly piloting a program to let brands like Maybelline and Folgers pay to send free samples to consumers …
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Over a dozen ex-Facebook employees detail how the company's leaders and stacked ranking performance reviews foster a culture where any dissent is discouraged  —  - More than a dozen former Facebook employees detailed how the company's leadership and its performance review system has created a culture where any dissent is discouraged.
Washington Post:
Melissa Eddy / New York Times:
Twenty-year-old German man admits to stealing and publishing data on hundreds of lawmakers, journalists, and other figures from every party except far-right AfD  —  BERLIN — A 20-year-old German student took advantage of passwords as weak as “Iloveyou” and “1234” to hack into online accounts …
Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:
AT&T has rolled out software updates to some Android phones changing its branding of 4G LTE to “5G E”, says that 5G with mmWave technology will be branded “5G+”  —  AT&T starts swapping out “4G” status bar icons with “5GE.”  —  There's a new cellular network technology …
Taylor Lorenz / The Atlantic:
Instagram accounts were allegedly coordinating sharing of child porn using hashtags, then a viral campaign spotlighted it, and finally Instagram banned the tags  —  A hashtag war has been brewing on Instagram between users who appear to be trading child pornography and the memers intent on stopping them.
Roger Cheng / CNET:
HTC unveils Vive Pro Eye, a new VR headset with eye-tracking capabilities, coming in April, and teases the Vive Cosmos, a new consumer-friendly headset  —  HTC wants to make it easier for everyone to get into virtual reality.  And it hopes to do it through the Vive Cosmos.

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