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.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
SubQ Snap 1.1: the first long-context decision model for real enterprise work  —  Tied for #1 on the AA Decision Index, Snap is a multimodal model with a 384k-token context window for fast reasoning and agentic decisions.
Zoho:
The quiet power of email marketing to maximize impact for nonprofits  —  A life changed.  A problem solved.  A community strengthened.  A future made a little better than it was yesterday.For nonprofits, that's the metric.
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.
WebBrain:
WebBrain: an open-source AI agent for your browser  —  Read pages, fill forms and automate tasks in Chrome or Firefox.  Use local models or your preferred AI provider.  Get started free.

Featured Podcasts

Sources:
A quiet investor's $10 billion bet on AI, chips, and defense
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.
Cheeky Pint:
The company building America's uranium supply from scratch
Stripe cofounder John Collison interviews founders, builders, and leaders over a pint.
Subscribe to Cheeky Pint.
Grit:
The Difference Between 1% Improvements and 10x Growth | Immad Akhund
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
How a 19-year-old intern built the growth engine behind this $2B AI company | Hector Serrano
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
Big Tech's Ugly Week, Getting Rich At Anthropic, AI Costs Plunge
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.
Machine Gods:
OpenAI's Latest Discoveries Spark a Backlash + Help! My Kid Hates AI
The official podcast of the singularity, from Casey Newton and Kevin Roose. Twice-weekly news, analysis, and interviews with the people who are building the future.
Subscribe to Machine Gods.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:40 PM ET, August 4, 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

Ben Riley-Smith / Telegraph:

Earlier Picks

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