Techmeme
August 4, 2019, 3:40 PM

Top News

Robert Evans / bellingcat:
El Paso, the third mass shooting announced on 8chan, shows how its /pol/ board deliberately radicalizes mass shooters and gamifies the massacre of innocents  —  On August 3, 2019, at around 11am local time, initial police reports indicated that a gunman had walked into an El Paso Wal-Mart and opened fire.
Maddy Myers / Kotaku:
E3 website leaks personal info, including addresses and phone numbers, of 2,000+ reporters and content creators; E3 has removed file but data still circulates  —  A spreadsheet containing the contact information and personal addresses of over 2,000 games journalists, editors …
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Data breach seller provides evidence that sneaker marketplace StockX was hacked in May, says 6.8M records with contact info and hashed passwords were taken  —  It wasn't “system updates” as it claimed.  StockX was mopping up after a data breach, TechCrunch can confirm.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Report: out of 188,620 extensions available on the Chrome Web Store, ~50% have fewer than 16 installs and 87% have fewer than 1,000; only 13 have 10M+ users  —  Around 87% of all Google Chrome extensions have fewer than 1,000 installs.  —  There are 188,620 extensions available on the Chrome Web Store …
Karen Hao / MIT Technology Review:
A look at edtech startups like Squirrel AI that are using AI to personalize learning in China, where fierce academic competition is driving an AI education boom  —  In recent years, the country has rushed to pursue “intelligent education.”  Now its billion-dollar ed-tech companies are planning to export their vision overseas.
Alex Wilhelm / Crunchbase News:
WeWork has acquired at least six software companies related to real estate, possibly to build a software stack that it can sell to other real estate companies  —  This week WeWork, also known as The We Company and best known for its global coworking business, is adding another software company to its portfolio of acquisitions.
Sharon Terlep / Wall Street Journal:
How companies use AI in customer service: some to serve clients better, and some to find the “breakpoint” at which their service is so bad that a customer quits  —  Technology lets companies see how badly they can treat consumers, right up until the moment they bolt
Colin Dixon / nScreenMedia:
Parks Associates: 39% of US broadband homes own a streaming media player, up 1% since 2018; Roku and Amazon Fire TV own 39% and 30% of the market, respectively  —  New research data shows that streaming media player growth is flattening.  However, the number of connected TV homes continues to grow strongly, thanks to smart TV.
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Former Building 8 employees shed light on Facebook's challenges in trying to break into consumer hardware, as it struggles to turn Portal into a success  —  KEY POINTS  — Building 8, the laboratory she started, turned into a costly failure for Facebook, and Dugan was gone in less than two years.

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Earlier Picks

Reuters:
Matt Day / Bloomberg:
Nick Statt / The Verge: