Techmeme
June 20, 2019, 12:50 PM

Top News

Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple says in a letter to US trade representative that tariffs on its products would make it less competitive and reduce its contribution to the US economy  —  Amid trade tensions between the United States and China, Apple this week sent a letter to United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Apple is asking suppliers to study feasibility of shifting final assembly of some products out of China amid trade tensions  —  iPhone maker is asking suppliers to study moving final assembly of some products out of the country  —  Apple Inc. AAPL -.29% is asking suppliers …
Lauren Feiner / CNBC:
Slack opens at $38.50, up more than 50% from its $26 reference price, on its first day of trading, valuing the company at more than $20B  —  KEY POINTS  — Slack reported a net loss of $138.9 million on revenue of $400.55 million for the year ended Jan. 31.
Terry Spencer / Associated Press:
A Florida city council votes to pay $600K ransom to hackers who, over three weeks ago, encrypted city records, disabled its email system, and more  —  FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — A Florida city agreed to pay $600,000 in ransom to hackers who took over its computer system …
Pete Schroeder / Reuters:
Senate panel says it will hold a hearing on Facebook's Libra on July 16; source: David Marcus, who leads Facebook's blockchain efforts, is expected to testify  —  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate Banking Committee will discuss Facebook's proposed cryptocurrency at a July 16 hearing, the panel announced Wednesday.
Wirecutter:
Google says it has fixed an issue with some used Nest cameras that gave previous owners unfettered access to images when paired with a Wink hub  —  Note: After our story broke yesterday, a Google representative sent us the following statement: “We were recently made aware of an issue affecting …
Alan Ohnsman / Forbes:
Waymo partners with Renault and Nissan to explore creating driverless mobility services in France and Japan  —  Waymo, Alphabet Inc.'s self-driving vehicle unit, is preparing to expand the scope of its autonomous tech efforts beyond the U.S. in a new partnership with the Renault-Nissan Alliance aimed …
Washington Post:
Rob Copeland / Wall Street Journal:
BBC:
UK government says the age verification requirement for porn websites is delayed because it failed to inform European regulators about the plan  —  An age-check scheme designed to stop under-18s viewing pornographic websites has been delayed a second time.  —  The changes - which mean UK …
Rand Fishkin / SparkToro:
Analysis of 150B+ browser-based US Google searches in Q1 2019: only 41.45% resulted in organic clicks to non-Google sites, and 48.96% ended without a click  —  In December of 2018, Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, was asked a set of questions by the United States Congress.  His responses left... a lot... to be desired.
Abhinav Gupta / Facebook AI:
Facebook open sources PyRobot, a framework and ecosystem that enables AI researchers to program robots without specialized knowledge of the hardware  —  Frameworks such as PyTorch have dramatically accelerated the progress of research in AI subfields such as computer vision and natural language processing.
More: VentureBeat and Wired
FinSMEs:
Haoqipei, a Shangai-based B2B auto parts trading platform connecting vehicle repair shops with suppliers in 100+ cities in China, raises $60M Series D  —  Haoqipei, a Shangai, China-based Business-to-business (B2B) auto parts trading platform, closed US $60m in Series D financing.

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More News

James Fallows / The Atlantic:

Earlier Picks

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
Brian Heater / TechCrunch:
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet: