Techmeme
May 12, 2019, 9:00 PM

Top News

Campbell Robertson / New York Times:
Non-profit Mined Minds came into West Virginia promising to teach miners and others coding skills and get them well paid jobs, but left many of them worse off  —  Mined Minds came into West Virginia espousing a certain dogma, fostered in the world of start-ups and TED Talks.  Students found an erratic operation.
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
As it ponders Facebook fines, FTC must seek regulation forcing Facebook to make its social graph truly portable, letting users export friend lists to other apps  —  FTC must pave the path to competition  —  Choice for consumers compels fair treatment by corporations.
Leigh Cuen / CoinDesk:
Satoshi's Treasure scavenger hunt has 60K people signed up in less than a month, with teams as large as 600, searching for clues to access $1M worth of bitcoin  —  Nothing brings bitcoiners together like a quest peppered with cryptographic clues.  —  According to Satoshi's Treasure co-creator Eric Meltzer …
New York Times:
Researchers link a network of far right, far left sites and social media accounts trying to manipulate EU elections to the infrastructure Russia used in 2016  —  LONDON — Less than two weeks before pivotal elections for the European Parliament, a constellation of websites and social media accounts linked …
Andreessen Horowitz:
Enterprise startups should not rely on data network effects as a defensive moat and should focus on and invest in long-term defensibility from other areas  —  Data has long been lauded as a competitive moat for companies, and that narrative's been further hyped with the recent wave of AI startups.
Joshua Rivera / Kotaku:
A developer of cinematics for Mortal Kombat 11 says the violent content of the game and reference materials used to create it led to a PTSD diagnosis  —  Mortal Kombat 11 is a brutal game.  That's what you come for—sensational, over-the-top violence that's inventive and gratuitous on a level that doesn't exist anywhere else.
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Life360, an SF-based developer of a family tracking app, went public in Australia on Friday because, CEO says, late-stage US investors don't offer “clean terms”  —  KEY POINTS  — Life360, a San Francisco social company backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists …
Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:
At I/O, Google killed the Nest platform and shattered the Google/Nest privacy firewall, saddling many existing users with a dead-end ecosystem of products  —  The Nest ecosystem is dead.  Nest accounts are dead.  Nest's privacy firewall is dead.  —  MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. …
Tiffany Hsu / New York Times:
Loyalty programs, which are collecting vast amounts of personal data, are easy to join and often have flimsy passwords, making them very attractive to hackers  —  The punch cards stuffed in your wallet know next to nothing about you, except maybe how many frozen yogurts you still need to buy to get a free one.
Tweets: @felixsalmon
Spencer Soper / Bloomberg:
Amazon's recent pledge of $800M to make next-day delivery the new standard is pressuring rivals to increase their investments in logistics startups to compete  —  - Flexe and Dolly are lining up backing for national expansions  — Several of the upstarts are led by former Amazon executives

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Earlier Picks

Dan Primack / Axios:
Nick Clegg / New York Times:
Heather Somerville / Reuters: