Techmeme
September 23, 2019, 2:15 PM

Top News

Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Google Play Pass unveiled as a $4.99/mo. subscription for access to 350+ unlocked Android apps and games that are free of ads and IAPs; first year to be $2/mo.  —  No ads, no in-app purchases.  $1.99 introductory price  —  Today, Google is launching a new service called “Google Play Pass …
Cade Metz / New York Times:
Viral selfie app ImageNet Roulette demos biases in AI by surfacing labels applied by anonymous workers to a database of 14M photos, used to train AI for 9 years  —  ImageNet Roulette, a digital art project and viral selfie app, exposes how biases have crept into the artificial-intelligence technologies changing our lives.
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Samsung says Galaxy Fold will go on sale in the US on September 27 for $1,980 and will be available at AT&T, Best Buy, and Samsung stores  —  Months after it failed to launch, the Galaxy Fold is finally arriving in the United States later this week.  Unfortunately, the Galaxy Fold US launch …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Facebook's competitors are talking to FTC about the company's hardball tactics, some of which Snap compiled in a dossier called Project Voldemort  —  Antitrust investigation gives competitors chance to air complaints about Facebook's hardball tactics
Joseph Cox / VICE:
Code deployment toolmaker Chef says it will not renew contracts with ICE and CBP, after an ex-employee deleted his open-source code leading to customer downtime  —  Last week, a former employee deleted open-source code he wrote for a tool called Chef in protest over an ICE contract.
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Cloudflare enables a new “bot fight mode” as a opt-in feature for all accounts, which will frustrate bots via computationally intensive challenges  —  Cloudflare is ratcheting up its fight against bots with a new “fight mode,” which it says will frustrate and disincentivize bot operators from their malicious activity.
Tweets: @zackwhittaker
Nino Tasca / The Keyword:
Google says it doesn't retain Assistant audio recordings by default and it is increasing privacy protections for the transcription process used with a small set  —  Senior Product Manager, Google Assistant  —  We believe you should be able to easily understand how your data is used and why …
Popular Information:
Facebook page with 1.1M followers called “I Love America” is one of many Ukrainian-run pages now pushing pro-Trump propaganda and recycling 2016-era IRA memes  —  This is the online version of the Popular Information newsletter.  You can get independent accountability journalism in your inbox every week.
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
A look at Peloton, which may raise $1.2B in this week's IPO and sells $2.3K iPad-equipped stationary bikes and $40/mo. cycling video subscriptions to 510K+ subs  —  13 reasons this bike has a cult  —  It makes lazy people like me work out.  That's the genius of the Peloton bicycle.
CNBC:
Apple says it will assemble the new Mac Pro in Austin, TX, after it received federal product exclusions enabling it to import some parts without paying tariffs  —  - Apple will manufacture the new version of its Mac Pro desktop computer in Austin, Texas, the company announced on Monday.

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