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Techmeme
August 16, 2019, 12:25 AM
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Top News

Elizabeth Lopatto / The Verge:
A close reading of the S-1 of the soap opera that is The We Company, a “tech company” whose mission “is to elevate the world's consciousness”  —  On August 14th, The We Company (the company formerly known as WeWork) filed its mandatory S-1 paperwork to go public, and it's worth reading in full.
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
The Keyword:
Google Assistant now lets users create reminders that can be assigned to friends or family, including scheduled time-based or location-based reminders  —  If you're a fellow parent, you probably spend a lot of time coordinating with your partner through on-the-fly conversations, text messages or phone calls.
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Apple sues mobile device virtualization company Corellium, accusing it of copyright infringement for illegally replicating iOS, along with iPhone and iPad apps  —  Apple today filed a lawsuit against Corellium, a mobile device virtualization company that supports iOS.
Jeff John Roberts / Fortune:
Coinbase has acquired the custody business of Xapo, a service best known for storing bitcoins in a vault under a Swiss mountain; source says for $55M  —  Cryptocurrency firm Coinbase has acquired the custody business of Xapo, a service best known for storing Bitcoins in a vault under a Swiss mountain.
Will Oremus / OneZero:
YouTube's guidelines may not discriminate against LGBTQ creators, but their vagueness and ad-friendly conservatism leads to discriminatory enforcement  —  A new lawsuit highlights a basic injustice in YouTube's “ad-friendly” policies  —  ouTube wants to be a platform for self-expression for all kinds of people.
Shirin Ghaffary / Vox:
Study: leading AI models to detect hate speech are 1.5x more likely to flag tweets by African Americans as offensive or hateful, partly due to social context  —  A new study shows that leading AI models are 1.5 times more likely to flag tweets written by African Americans as “offensive” compared to other tweets.
Aric Toler / bellingcat:
A deep dive into Amazon FC Ambassadors program finds 53 Ambassador accounts in seven countries, some of which are using fake identities and recycling accounts  —  On August 14, a Twitter thread that included a small army of “Amazon FC Ambassadors” went viral, bringing to light Amazon's year-long social media brand ambassador program.
Karl Bode / VICE:
Google says data from its new “Password Checkup” Chrome extension shows that 1.5% of all website logins use credentials that have been compromised  —  New ‘Password Checkup’ Chrome extension found 1.5 percent of all website logins use compromised credentials, a figure that's higher for porn websites.
The Information:
Investors and employees of Toptal, a freelancing platform with ~$200M revenue and originally funded by $1.5M in convertible notes, have ended up with no equity  —  Toptal, a service that connects companies with freelance software engineers, is a Silicon Valley success story.
Ronald Eikenberg / heise online:
Data leak in Kaspersky's antivirus software for Windows has allowed third parties to potentially track users by injecting unique IDs into web pages since 2015  —  Kaspersky promises security and data protection.  However, a data leak allowed third parties to spy on users while they were surfing the web.
April Glaser / Slate:
Tech companies can do a lot more to protect the identities of people speaking in recordings used to train AI, like shifting the voice or gender of the speaker  —  It turns out that Siri, Alexa, and whatever it is you call Facebook Messenger have been a little loose-lipped with your conversations.

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:25 AM ET, August 16, 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.

From Mediagazer

Gary Baum / The Hollywood Reporter:
A look at the first “case” brought before Objection, which aims to use AI to evaluate news stories, and a Q&A with Objection's founder; the site is now dark

Daniel Arkin / NBC News:
Gene Shalit, a longtime film critic for NBC's Today who was with the show from 1970 until his retirement in 2010, dies at 100

Aidan Ryan / The Boston Globe:
A look at an AI-reliant news site for 19 towns south of Boston, which uses public meeting transcripts and LLMs to produce stories and has 350 paid subscribers

More News

Eugene Kim / CNBC:
Amazon launches a new donations program, called FBA Donations, for third-party sellers to dispose of unsold products stored in its warehouses in the US and UK

Earlier Picks

Colin Lecher / The Verge:
About 200 Google employees sign a petition, saying they “refuse to be complicit” in potential cloud computing work for the US Customs & Border Protection agency
Mariella Moon / Engadget:
AT&T and T-Mobile have started rolling out cross-network call authentication services to protect against spam and spoofed robocalls
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