Techmeme
June 26, 2019, 1:10 PM

Top News

Axios:
Apple says it has acquired autonomous driving startup Drive.ai, hiring dozens of Drive.ai engineers and, per sources, taking over its autonomous cars  —  Apple bought Drive.ai, an autonomous driving startup once valued at $200 million, Apple confirmed to Axios on Tuesday, and has hired dozens of Drive.ai engineers.
Taylor Lorenz / The Atlantic:
Social media verification scams are rampant because the verification process is opaque and arbitrary; platforms need to rebuild the whole system  —  Travis Hawley was scrolling through the comments sections of LeBron James's Instagram posts recently when he noticed some postings from other athletes.
New York Times:
Sources: US tech companies, including Intel and Micron, have found ways to sell millions of dollars of products to Huawei despite the Trump administration's ban  —  SHANGHAI — A number of the United States' biggest chip makers have sold millions of dollars of products to Huawei despite …
Erin Griffith / New York Times:
StockX, an online marketplace for sneakers, raises $110M Series C led by DST Global, General Atlantic, and GGV Capital and names Scott Cutler CEO  —  StockX is one of several online marketplaces that have turned resales of shoes into a big — and highly valued — business.
Mariella Moon / Engadget:
Shopify says users can now message its 820K+ merchants through Apple's iMessage-based Business Chat service, and adds support for Apple Pay  —  Apple's Business Chat is no longer an exclusive club for big companies like the Four Seasons Hotel and Burberry.  Cupertino is expanding the service …
Nathaniel Popper / New York Times:
Executives at seven of Facebook's Libra partners say the companies have only signed nonbinding agreements and have not yet paid to join the Libra Association  —  SAN FRANCISCO — One of the biggest selling points of Facebook's ambitious plans for its new cryptocurrency, Libra …
Reuters:
Chinese state-sponsored hackers, notably APT10, broke into eight IT service providers including HPE, IBM, and their client networks in a years-long invasion  —  Eight of the world's biggest technology service providers were hacked by Chinese cyber spies in an elaborate and years-long invasion, Reuters found.
Sam Byford / The Verge:
Oppo demos an under-screen selfie camera with a display using a custom transparent material, plans to launch in a commercial phone “in the near future”  —  Coming to a commercial phone ‘in the near future’  —  The past couple of years of smartphone design have been dominated …
Wall Street Journal:
Report: tests of ~10K firmware images from 500+ Huawei telecom devices found 55% had at least one vulnerability, much higher than that of its rivals  —  Top U.S. officials say research confirms fears of risks, but report stops short of accusing the company of deliberately building flaws into system
Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:
Bill Gates says his “greatest mistake” was Microsoft losing the platform opportunity to Android on mobile, in an interview at VC firm Village Global  —  Gates calls Microsoft's smartphones failure a “$400 billion” loss.  —  Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently gave …
Ben Sisario / New York Times:
Classical music has been an awkward fit for major streaming platforms because their metadata schemes and algorithms are mostly designed to favor pop music  —  When Roopa Kalyanaraman Marcello, a classical music aficionado in Brooklyn, asked her Amazon Echo for some music recently …
Agam Shah / Wall Street Journal:
MLPerf, a consortium of 40 tech companies including Facebook and Google, releases a set of benchmarks for evaluating the performance of AI tools  —  Metrics cover AI performance in image recognition, object detection and voice translation  —  A consortium of tech companies …
More: Engadget
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Researchers have discovered OSX/Linker malware exploiting an unpatched macOS flaw that would allow a malicious binary to bypass the Gatekeeper scanning process  —  Researchers find new OSX/Linker malware abusing still-unpatched macOS Gatekeeper bypass.  —  Mac malware developers have jumped …
Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post:
A look at Facebook's and Twitter's plans to combat disinformation ahead of the Democratic presidential debates on Wednesday and Thursday  —  Ctrl + N  —  Silicon Valley will face its first big test of its readiness to fight disinformation in the 2020 campaign when the Democratic presidential debates kick off tonight.
Josh Eidelson / Bloomberg:
Frustrated by Google's policies affecting LGBTQ+ community, ~100 Googlers sign petition asking San Francisco Pride to exclude Google, a sponsor, from the parade  —  Almost 100 Google employees are urging the organizer of this weekend's San Francisco Pride parade to kick the company out of the celebration …
Corinne Abrams / Wall Street Journal:
Profile of Indian hotel-booking startup Oyo, which has more rooms in China than in India, as it faces a bumpy rollout in the US, where it has 50+ hotel partners  —  A rare emerging-market unicorn aims to upend the hospitality business—but first it has to fix that runaway ceiling fan
ProPublica:
Some US schools are using microphones equipped with “aggression detection” algorithms, which critics say are unreliable, raising concerns about surveillance  —  Headphones recommended. … Ariella Russcol specializes in drama at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Queens …

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More News

Sidney Fussell / The Atlantic:
Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch: