Techmeme
May 2, 2019, 4:40 PM

Top News

Casey Newton / The Verge:
Facebook bans Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, Louis Farrakhan, and others from Facebook and Instagram, citing dangerous individuals and orgs policy  —  Milo Yiannopoulos and Louis Farrakhan have been banned as well  —  Facebook today removed Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones …
Bloomberg:
How Satya Nadella led Microsoft to have more subscribers than Netflix, more cloud computing revenue than Google, and a near-trillion-dollar market cap  —  The congratulatory texts and tweets started the last week of November.  Microsoft had overtaken Apple to become the world's most valuable company …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Verizon is seeking a buyer for Tumblr as it tries to steady Verizon Media Group, which has struggled to meet revenue targets  —  Wireless giant seeks buyer for social-media service that has lost ground to Facebook  —  Verizon Communications Inc. is seeking a buyer for blogging website Tumblr …
Satyajit Sinha / Counterpoint Research:
Global smartwatch shipments up 48% YoY in Q1 2019: Apple Watch grew 49% YoY for a 35.8% market share, followed by Samsung's 127% YoY growth for an 11% share  —  Top nine brands contribute to 75% of the market shipment.  Samsung, Fitbit, and Huawei grew exponentially in Q1 2019
Human Rights Watch:
Researchers reverse engineer an app used by Chinese authorities in Xinjiang which connects to a mass surveillance system for tracking Muslim minorities  —  ‘Reverse Engineering’ Police App Reveals Profiling and Monitoring Strategies  —  Languages  —  Chinese authorities are using …
Nancy Scola / Politico:
Source: FTC and Facebook are negotiating a settlement where Facebook must appoint a federally approved privacy official and create a privacy oversight committee  —  Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission are negotiating a possible settlement that would require the company …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Spotify launches voice-enabled ads, which encourage the listener to say a command to take action on the ad's content, in a limited test in the US  —  Spotify is increasing its investment in voice technology, as hinted at earlier this week on the company's earnings call with investors.
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
At F8, Facebook emphasized products and features it aspires to become dominant tomorrow, but despite much talk, didn't actually launch any new privacy features  —  Zuckerberg gets aspirational  —  In Facebook's dreams, it's a clean and private place.  People spend their time having …
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Google says it will roll out a new tool that lets users limit how long it keeps location, search, and browsing data to either three or 18 months  —  Last August, the Associated Press reported that various Google apps store the timestamped locations of the devices on which they're installed.
Matt Perez / Forbes:
Behind the fiasco of Star Citizen, a primarily crowdfunded video game that has raised ~$300M and isn't close to full launch after seven years of development  —  It's October 2018 and 2,000 video game fanatics are jammed into Austin's Long Center for the Performing Arts to get a glimpse of Star Citizen …
David Shepardson / Reuters:
Alphabet tells US House panel it spends hundreds of millions annually on content review, has manually reviewed 1M+ suspected terrorist videos on YouTube in Q1  —  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's Google unit told a U.S. House panel it annually spends hundreds of millions of dollars …
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Sense, a contractor engagement and communication platform, raises $13.5M Series B led by GV with participation from Accel, bringing total raised to $23.5M  —  The rise of the “gig economy” has created a slew of billion-dollar companies eager to capitalize on the growth of smartphones and ubiquitous connectivity.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Colorado-based Red Canary raises $34M led by Summit Partners, bringing its total raised to $48.9M, for its suite of cloud-based threat detection services  —  Red Canary, a five-year-old Denver, Colorado-based company developing cloud-based security services, today announced that it's secured $34 million …
More: PR Newswire and FinSMEs
Tara Seals / Threatpost:
Flashpoint says April Wipro attack was done by hackers who may have been operating under the radar since '15, have the hallmarks of an advanced, organized group  —  New details are emerging in the April attack on systems consulting behemoth Wipro, which saw its network hacked and used for mounting attacks on a dozen of its customers.
Axios:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Facebook launches two new open source AI tools: BoTorch, based on PyTorch, for Bayesian library optimization and Ax, a platform for managing AI experiments  —  At its F8 developer conference, Facebook today launched Ax and BoTorch, two new open-source AI tools.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:

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