Techmeme: LinkedIn says it blocked or removed 21.6M fake accounts in the first half 2019, of which 19.5M were blocked at the registration stage (Nat Levy/GeekWire)

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Sources: Alibaba has delayed its up to $15B listing in Hong Kong, initially set to launch in late August, amid growing political unrest — HONG KONG/NEW YORK (Reuters) - China's biggest e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has delayed its up to $15 billion listing …

More: Washington Post, New York Times, Market Realist, Fortune, Financial Times, Pandaily, Coinspeaker, The Verge, Tech in Asia, Seeking Alpha, Nikkei Asian Review, and USA Today. Tweets: @donie

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Reuters:

Amazon says it is opening an office in Hyderabad, India, which will house over 15,000 employees, making it the company's biggest campus in the world — HYDERABAD (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc on Wednesday launched its biggest campus in the world in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad …

More: Times of India, GeekWire, Engadget, The Seattle Times, PYMNTS.com, and Seeking Alpha

Ryan Smith / AnandTech:

Intel unveils 10th-gen Comet Lake CPUs with up to 6 cores for thin and light laptops, based on its Skylake CPU architecture and 14nm process — Capping off a busy few weeks for processors for Intel, today the company is announcing the second half of their product stack for their low-power 10th generation Core processors.

More: The Verge, Engadget, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, Inquirer, PCWorld, PCWorld, VentureBeat, Engadget, Windows Central, and IGN

Tweets: @jrssnet and @anandtech

Amrita Khalid / Engadget:

Google and Mozilla say they will block the root certificate issued by the Kazakhstan government, which could be used to monitor users, in Chrome and Firefox — Google and Mozilla are taking action against the government of Kazakhstan's efforts to launch a surveillance operation against its own citizens.

More: The Mozilla Blog, ZDNet, TechCrunch, Google Online Security Blog, Reuters, BBC, CNET, Axios, 9to5Mac, VICE, The Next Web, Neowin, IT PRO, SecurityWeek, The Hacker News, Wired, and VentureBeat

Tweets: @askhalid, @wired, @josephfcox, @josephfcox, and @campuscodi

Washington Post:

Apple is delaying its plans to limit third-party tracking and ads in kids' apps, which it planned to implement in Sept., after some developers raised concerns — Apple plans to change the rules it has for kids apps, raising concerns among some app developers about the way the tech giant wields power unilaterally over its App Store.

More: iPhone in Canada Blog, Thurrott, Engadget, AppleInsider, iPhone Hacks, Cult of Mac, 9to5Mac, and MacRumors

Tweets: @reedalbergotti, @carnage4life, and @palan57. Thanks:@cremnob

Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post:

Facebook's conservative bias “audit” draws criticism from both sides after relying on interviews with 130 unnamed conservatives over internal data — Neither Republicans nor civil rights groups are happy.

More: HuffPost and Gizmodo

Tweets: @dellcam, @lam_barrett, @melissaryan, @lam_barrett, @lam_barrett, @libertarianblue, and @danpfeiffer

See also Mediagazer

Sara Fischer / Axios:

Facebook debuts first findings from conservative bias audit led by former GOP senator, says it influenced policy changes like creating a content oversight board

John Whitehouse / Media Matters for America:

Contrary to conservatives' claims, data from 2018-19 shows right-leaning Facebook Pages with over 500,000 likes consistently outperform left-leaning rivals

More: The Interface, Gizmodo, and New York Times. Tweets: @mmfa

Nat Levy / GeekWire:

LinkedIn says it blocked or removed 21.6M fake accounts in the first half 2019, of which 19.5M were blocked at the registration stage — LinkedIn blocked or removed 21.6 million fake accounts on its platform from January to June of this year, a sign that the Microsoft-owned social network …

More: Official LinkedIn Blog, CyberScoop, Mercury News, CNET, MSPoweruser, Social Media Today, and Adweek

Tweets: @tonyajoriley and @thekenyeung

Abner Li / 9to5Google:

YouTube says it is shutting down its Messages feature for mobile and web, introduced in 2017, to encourage usage of posts, comments, and stories — In August 2017, YouTube introduced a “Messages” feature for its mobile apps and later the web. Two years later, the Google video site announced …

More: Android Police, XDA Developers, TechCrunch, Tubefilter, Phandroid, Android Authority, Android Central, and Engadget. Tweets: @martinsfp

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:

Google says it has started rolling out AI-powered real-time spelling and grammar check features on Gmail for all G Suite users — Ever been stumped by spelling or sentence syntax while pecking out an email to colleagues? Fortunately for G Suite users, Google will soon introduce improved spelling …

More: G Suite Updates Blog, Fortune, Gizmodo, Android Authority, Inquirer, MSPoweruser, KnowTechie, The Next Web, Android Headlines, PhoneArena, Android Police, 9to5Google, Neowin, and The Verge

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:

Waymo releases a self-driving open data set with 1,000 segments of 20-second footage in a range of driving conditions, free for non-commercial research — Waymo is opening up its significant stores of autonomous driving data with a new ‘Open Data Set’ it's making available for the purposes of research.

More: Waymo, Engadget, VentureBeat, The Verge, and Mashable

Sean Captain / Fast Company:

WeWork offices use the same WiFi password across many locations and employ the weak WPA2 Personal security protocol, creating potential for abuse — The We Company sees itself as a world-changing tech platform. But it's used the same easy-to-guess password and dated Wi-Fi security for years.

Tweets: @seancaptain. Thanks:@mariedomingo

Lauren Kaori Gurley / VICE:

Lyft has been sued at least seven times in August by women alleging sexual assault by drivers and little action from the company — The ride share giant has been sued at least seven times this month related to rides that allegedly ended with rape or sexual assault.

Tweets: @aishacs and @jason_koebler

TechCrunch:

A roundup of the 82 companies that launched at Y Combinator's Summer 2019 Demo Day 2, including logistics, e-commerce, real estate, and crypto startups — Team TechCrunch was back for Day 2 of Y Combinator's Summer 2019 Demo Days where we heard from another massive chunk of startups …

More: Crunchbase News, Howard Lindzon, and TechCrunch

Tweets: @rowantrollope and @lucasmtny

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:

Tala, a PayPal-backed startup that provides uncollateralized loans in emerging markets, raises $110M Series D led by RPS Ventures to expand into India — Tala, a Santa Monica, California-headquartered startup that creates a credit profile to provide uncollateralized loans to millions of people …

More: The Economic Times, Financial Times, Forbes, and Crunchbase News

Stephanie Condon / ZDNet:

Box unveils Box Shield, a set of native security controls with machine learning-powered threat detection for customers' cloud content, in private beta — With Box Shield, customers get machine learning-powered threat detection, as well as the ability to set classification-based security policies.

More: TechCrunch, SiliconANGLE, and VentureBeat

Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:

Adult website Luscious left data of 1M+ users exposed, including user email addresses, location data, the content they uploaded, liked, and shared — A popular hentai porn site that promises anonymity to its 1.1 million users left a user database exposed without a password, allowing anyone to identify users by their email addresses.

More: vpnMentor, Threatpost, TechSpot, The Daily Dot, Mashable, Forbes, CNET, Gizmodo, The Next Web, Silicon Republic, IT PRO, and ZDNet. Tweets: @zackwhittaker

Ron Miller / TechCrunch:

Crossbeam, which builds a platform for potential partner companies to compare data, raises $12.5M Series A led by FirstMark Capital — When Crossbeam CEO and co-founder Bob Moore was working at previous startups, he noticed a problem around sharing information with potential partners.

More: Philadelphia Business Journal and Technical.ly Philly

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