Techmeme
May 22, 2019, 4:35 PM

Top News

Dave Lee / BBC:
Leaked memo: ARM has told staff it must suspend business, including all active contracts, support entitlements, and pending engagements, with Huawei  —  UK-based chip designer ARM has told staff it must suspend business with Huawei, according to internal documents obtained by the BBC.
Bloomberg:
Natalia Drozdiak / Bloomberg:
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Apple unveils Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution, a new web technology aimed at preserving user privacy without reducing effectiveness of ad campaigns  —  For years, the web has been largely free thanks to online ads.  The problem is that nobody likes them.
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Amazon shareholders reject two non-binding proposals to ban sale of facial recognition tech to government customers, despite pressure from ACLU and others  —  Amazon shareholders have rejected two proposals that would have requested the company not to sell its facial recognition technology to government customers.
Emily Stewart / Vox:
Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:
Federal judge rules in favor of FTC in antitrust case against Qualcomm, says its licensing practices for modem chips have strangled competition; stock drops 10%  —  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the United States has won the first round of litigation against Qualcomm.
Ginny Marvin / Search Engine Land:
Google begins rolling out an updated mobile search design with a black “ad” label and favicons for all organic results  —  The new look brings some branding to the search results, and preps the mobile search for more types of content and actions for users to take right from the search results.
New York Times:
Google says around 25% of calls placed using its Duplex AI service started with a human; calls to ~12 restaurants found people made 3 of 4 successful bookings  —  In a free service, bots call restaurants and make reservations.  The technology is impressive, except for when the caller is actually a person.
Alastair Marsh / Bloomberg:
Source: Block.one, which raised ~$4B in its ICO, has made $174M in VC investments and bought back 10% of its stock, rewarding early investors like Peter Thiel  —  Billionaire moneymen Peter Thiel, Alan Howard and Louis Bacon have seen plenty of big paydays—but probably none as unusual as this one.
Keith Barry / Consumer Reports:
Testing finds Tesla's updated Autopilot software, designed to make changing lanes “more seamless”, does not work well and could create safety risks for drivers  —  CR finds that latest version of Tesla's automatic lane-changing feature is far less competent than a human driver
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Ireland's Data Protection Commission, the lead EU supervisory authority for Google, announces investigation into Google's online advertising data collection  —  KEY POINTS  — Ireland's Data Protection Commission says its probe will examine whether Google's processing of data in advertising transactions breaches EU privacy rules.
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Google says it stored some G Suite passwords in plaintext due to an error dating back to 2005, found another set of unhashed passwords in 2019, both now fixed  —  Google says a small number of its enterprise customers mistakenly had their passwords stored on its systems in plaintext.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Researcher: devices can be tracked across apps and sites with info from sensors like gyroscope; patched on iOS; a minor issue on Android, given poor calibration  —  SensorID technique can track users across apps and websites using sensor calibration data.  —  A new device fingerprinting technique …
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Transport for London says it will roll out default WiFi device tracking on the Underground this summer, after a trial in 2016, to improve analytics and more  —  Transport for London will roll out default wi-fi device tracking on the London Underground this summer, following a trial back in 2016.
Nick Statt / The Verge:
UNESCO says AI assistants are reinforcing gender stereotypes by mostly defaulting to female-sounding voices, urges better safeguards against gendered language  —  Female-sounding default voices perpetuate antiquated, harmful ideas about women  —  Artificial intelligence-powered voice assistants …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Valve launches a dedicated Steam Chat app for iOS and Android, which includes many key features of the desktop chat client such as Invite Links and Group Chats  —  Valve announced that the new Steam Chat mobile app has gone live as a free chat app iOS and Android platforms.

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Steve O'Hear / TechCrunch:
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet: