Techmeme
February 8, 2019, 4:50 PM

Top News

Washington Post:
Sources: after a wave of opposition in New York, Amazon execs have had internal discussions recently to reassess the situation and explore alternatives for HQ2  —  Amazon.com is reconsidering its plan to bring 25,000 jobs to a new campus in New York City following a wave of opposition from local politicians …
Richard Lawler / Engadget:
Sprint sues AT&T over its “5G Evolution” branding, claims it is false and deceptive advertising that is damaging the reputation of actual 5G  —  After AT&T decided to start rolling out “5G Evolution” branding on phones and networks that use 4G LTE Advanced technology …
Jeff Bezos:
Jeff Bezos publishes letters from National Enquirer owner AMI that he says show threats to publish his nude photos unless he stops probing AMI's reporting  —  Something unusual happened to me yesterday.  Actually, for me it wasn't just unusual—it was a first.  I was made an offer I couldn't refuse.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Google warns about two iOS zero-day vulnerabilities that hackers have been actively exploiting; the vulnerabilities have been fixed in iOS 12.1.4 update  —  iOS users are advised to update to iOS 12.1.4; release which also fixes infamous FaceTime bug.  —  A Google top security engineer …
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac:
The Moscow Times:
Report: Google pulls government-banned sites from Russian search results, blocking ~70% of sites blacklisted by Russia's communications regulator Roskomnadzor  —  Google has started to remove certain entries from its search results in Russia in compliance with long-standing demands from the authorities …
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Google unveils Adiantum, a new form of encryption for data on lower-end smartphones and other devices with insufficient processing power  —  Google officially unveiled a new form of encryption today, designed to secure data stored on lower-end smartphones and other devices with insufficient processing power.
Roger Parloff / Yahoo! Finance:
Alex Stamos and 19 people who knew him professionally over the course of his career talk about his work at various startups, Yahoo, Facebook, and now, Stanford  —  Alex Stamos, whose highest degree is a BS in computer science and electrical engineering, delivered his first academic lecture.
Tweets: @mathewi, @mathewi, @readdanwrite, and @k8em0Thanks:@jpmanga
Brendan Nyhan / Medium:
Research comparing 2016 and 2018 suggests Facebook's efforts to limit the reach of fake news are working, but the platform's scale remains an alluring target  —  After the shock of the 2016 presidential election, many Americans found psychological refuge in a simple explanation for why Donald Trump won: “fake news.”
Megan Rose Dickey / TechCrunch:
JUMP says 63K+ people took 625,000 rides on its bikes in San Francisco in the past year and each bike saw an average of seven rides per day  —  In the past year, more than 63,000 people took 625,000 rides on JUMP bikes in San Francisco, JUMP announced today.
More: Mashable
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Facebook acquires visual shopping app GrokStyle; Ikea's app uses GrokStyle's AI-based tech to let users find furniture similar to that in their photos  —  Facebook Inc. said it acquired visual shopping and artificial intelligence startup GrokStyle Inc. in a move to bolster the social-media company's own AI work.
Securelist:
Kaspersky Lab's DDoS trends report: number of DDoS attacks dropped 13% YoY in 2018, but the average duration of attacks grew from 95 min in Q1 to 218 min in Q4  —  News overview  —  In Q4 2018, security researchers detected a number of new botnets, which included not only Mirai clones for a change.
More: TechSpot
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Amazon joins Microsoft in expressing support for regulating facial recognition tech, offers guidelines for the “responsible use” of the technology  —  Amazon supports the creation of a “legislative framework” covering facial recognition technology.
Jason Hiner / CNET:
Google Fiber to shut down in Louisville on April 15 after an experimental “nanotrenching” technique to deploy fiber in trenches only two inches deep, failed  —  Google's trick to more rapidly and cheaply deploy its super-speedy Google Fiber project has hit a wall …
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
After Twitter lost monthly active users for the past three quarters, the company will stop disclosing the number from Q2, will report daily active users instead  —  Twitter's monthly user count has fallen for three quarters in a row, so to address the issue, Twitter has decided to stop announcing how many users it keeps losing.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

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Dami Lee / The Verge:
BBC: