Techmeme
August 14, 2019, 11:30 AM

Top News

Josh Taylor / The Guardian:
Fingerprints of 1M+ people and biometric info from a system used by banks, London police, and defense contractors, discovered on a publicly accessible database  —  Fingerprints, facial recognition and other personal information from Biostar 2 discovered on publicly accessible database
Dan Primack / Axios:
WeWork files to raise $1B in an IPO, reports a $904M net loss on around $1.5B in revenue for first half of 2019  —  WeWork on Wednesday filed to raise $1 billion in an initial public offering, although the ultimate offering amount is expected to be at least three times larger.
Bloomberg:
FAA sent airlines a reminder to follow 2016 safety instructions that ban goods with recalled batteries, like recently recalled MacBook Pros, from the planes  —  - FAA says some MacBook Pros shouldn't be taken on airplanes  — Apple recently recalled select laptops over battery fire risk
Sarah Frier / Bloomberg:
Sources: Facebook paid hundreds of contractors to transcribe user audio; FB says it's stopped the work, which affected users who wanted voice chats transcribed  —  - Social network says it paused human review of conversations  — Apple, Amazon, Google have been scrutinized for similar work
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Twitter to soon let users follow interests, starting with sports, and create separate timelines for different topics; topics will be curated by Twitter using AI  —  A new way to explore interests on Twitter  —  Twitter will begin letting users follow interests, the company said today …
Ursula Perano / Axios:
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
Microsoft patches four wormable BlueKeep-like bugs in Remote Desktop Service, two of which can be exploited remotely without authentication or user interaction  —  Most Microsoft Windows (ab)users probably welcome the monthly ritual of applying security updates about as much as they look forward …
Ed Targett / Computer Business Review:
Amazon says it has added “fear” to the range of emotions that its Rekognition facial recognition software can now detect  —  Release follows amid immigration protests  —  AWS has added “fear” to the range of emotions identified by its Amazon Rekognition facial analysis service …
Ian Allison / CoinDesk:
Sources: Coinbase and Barclays end UK partnership, started in early 2018; Coinbase partners with ClearBank, which may have asked the exchange to drop Zcash  —  The most prestigious banking relationship in crypto has ended.  —  Barclays, the London-based global bank, is no longer working …
Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:
Boatsetter, a peer-to-peer boat rental marketplace, raises $10M Series A extension round led by WestCap Group and Valor Equity, bringing total raised to $31M  —  Obviously, not everyone owns their boat, and boat ownership is far more unique than car ownership - which makes it maybe …
More: PYMNTS.com
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
How a scammer ran a decade-long crowdfunding operation that raised ~$6M on Indiegogo and from other investors to build an ambitious phone/tablet/laptop device  —  The crowdfunded phone of the future was a multimillion-dollar scam  —  In 2014, Jeffrey Tschiltsch opened an email from Indiegogo and saw the future of computing.
Megan Rose Dickey / TechCrunch:
Scoop, which provides a carpooling service for enterprises, raises $60M round led by Activate Capital, bringing its total raised to $106M  —  Enterprise carpooling startup Scoop just closed a $60 million round led by Activate Capital with participation from Goldman Sachs, NGP Capital …
More: FinSMEs and VentureBeat
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Indian budget hotel booking startup Oyo says it will invest €300M in its vacation home rental business, as it looks to expand its footprint in Europe  —  Indian budget hotel booking startup Oyo will invest 300 million euros ($335 million) in its vacation home rental business …
Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:
Nvidia says it has broken records for real-time conversational AI, training the industry-standard BERT model in 53 minutes and then inferring responses in ~2ms  —  Nvidia's GPU-powered platform for developing and running conversational AI that understands and responds to natural language requests …
Ana Wolsztajn / Tech.eu:
Berlin-based PaulCamper, a sharing platform for renting and lending RVs, raises €7M Series A led by Adevinta  —  PaulCamper, a sharing platform for renting and lending RVs, has closed a Series A financing round of €7 million.  The round was led by Adevinta with participation …
More: FinSMEs and EU-Startups

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More News

Dara Kerr / CNET:
Kaya Yurieff / CNN:

Earlier Picks

The Information:
Lucas Matney / TechCrunch:
Casey Newton / The Verge: