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 …

Sponsor Posts

Command Line:
Introducing Microsoft-Decision-1, our model for fast decision-making  —  Our new model delivers top performance in latency and quality on structured decision tasks to outperform other models.
Will Reed:
The best sales leaders aren't job hunting.  Here's how to reach them without months of cold outreach.  —  Our team came from Box, Square, and Brex, so we already know the GTM leaders worth meeting.
Zoho:
Zoho Books now supports CT600 & Final Accounts Filing as an add-on in the FREE plan  —  Managing end-of-year filing for limited companies in the UK is often expensive and multi-layered.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
Meta & Microsoft's Claude Slowdown, His Agent Leaked His Banking Info, Don't Bully Your AI
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Sources:
Qualcomm's CEO on the coming AI phone supercycle
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Bringing Back Mammoths And Building Noah's Ark 2.0 | Colossal's Ben Lamm
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Great Chat:
The launch industrial complex
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Larry Ellison's Media Ambitions & Kevin Roose on AI's Biggest Gamble
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Training Data:
Google's AI Infrastructure Chief, Amin Vahdat, on the Physics & Economics of Frontier AI
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 1:10 PM ET, June 26, 2019.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Sidney Fussell / The Atlantic:
Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

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