Techmeme: Red Hat's big sale, disappointing exits of Hadoop-based startups and Pivotal show how public clouds like AWS affect business models of open source-focused firms (Charles Fitzgerald/Platformonomics)

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November 25, 2019, 12:20 AM

Top News

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian / ICIJ:

Leaked Chinese government docs reveal the mechanics of running mass detention camps in Xinjiang, predictive policing, mass surveillance, and snooping on expats — A new leak of highly classified Chinese government documents has uncovered the operations manual for running the mass detention camps …

More: BBC, New York Times, and Financial Times

Tweets: @jeremykonyndyk, @nytopinion, @williamyang120, @parrav, @bethanyallenebr, @amybwang, @dabeard, @pekingmike, @mgerrydoyle, @ryanfduffy, @bethanyallenebr, @dannyboycrump, @icijorg, @williamyang120, and @peter_dutton

Charles Fitzgerald / Platformonomics:

Red Hat's big sale, disappointing exits of Hadoop-based startups and Pivotal show how public clouds like AWS affect business models of open source-focused firms — TL;DR: If the cloud didn't eat Hadoop Inc., Pivotal and Red Hat, what explains their diminished prospects?

Tweets: @codinghorror, @carnage4life, @bassamtabbara, @marypcbuk, @trengriffin, @jim_dowling, @charlesfitz, and @samerkamal

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:

India-based financial services startup Paytm raises $1B led by T. Rowe Price, valuing the company at ~$16B; Paytm has raised more than $3.3B to date — Paytm said on Monday it has raised $1 billion in a new financing round as the Noida-headquartered firm, which once dominated …

More: Times of India, Reuters, and SiliconANGLE

Chris Stokel-Walker / Increment:

A look at the team behind VLC, which started as a student-run project in 1996 that is now part of a nonprofit with a for-profit consultancy managed by ~10 staff — How a group of university students transformed a school project into a media-player mainstay. — Teams

Tweets: @davezatz and @incrementmag

Julia Carrie Wong / The Guardian:

White nationalist outlets including VDare and Red Ice TV still operate on Facebook despite its ban on white nationalism; Facebook says it is investigating — Guardian analysis finds VDare and Red Ice TV among several outlets that are still on the platform despite Facebook's promised ban

Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:

A former Facebook employee who was embedded with the 2016 Trump campaign details how he leveraged Facebook's ad-targeting tools and products to help them win — James Barnes is now focused on using digital-ad strategies to try to get Trump out of office — After the 2016 presidential election …

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @natesilver538, @keithboykin, @noahshachtman, @antoniogm, @fmbutt, @adamsinger, @nickgillespie, @b52malmet, @jessekellydc, @jason_kint, @counternotions, @four4thefire, @govhowarddean, @jonathanalter, @blakehounshell, @slpng_giants, and @adamserwer

Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg:

Carousell, SE Asia's biggest classifieds site, to merge with Telenor's 701Search; Telenor will invest $20M and have 32% stake in merged company valued at $850M+ — - The equity and cash deal gives Telenor 32% in combined company — Telenor's 701Search has business in Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam

More: atr.asiatechreview.com. Tweets: @jonrussell and @business

Nick Heath / TechRepublic:

Interview with Stephen Wolfram about the future of Wolfram|Alpha, how programming needs to evolve, Wolfram Language as a “computational language”, and more — The brains behind Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language talks about how programming languages need to develop.

Tweets: @techrepublic and @techrepublic

Helene Fouquet / Bloomberg:

Huawei sues for defamation in Paris after a researcher, broadcast journalist, and telco expert say on TV that it spies against the West and is state controlled — - Claim it's controlled by the Chinese state is false, it says — The company is seeking to sell 5G equipment in Europe

Tweets: @alecolarizi, @zackwhittaker, @dana_heide, and @mattwaxman1

Susan D'Agostino / Quanta Magazine:

Barbara Liskov, a Turing Award winner who invented some key principles of object-oriented programming, on what it takes a woman to get to the top of CS field — Barbara Liskov pioneered the modern approach to writing code. She warns that the challenges facing computer science today can't be overcome with good design alone.

Tweets: @codeorg, @le_rond, @danlizotte, @quantamagazine, @rsukumar, @quantamagazine, @rubenverborgh, @quantamagazine, and @quantamagazine

Ava Kofman / ProPublica:

ProPublica claims to have found 57 unlabeled state-sponsored channels on YouTube; after presented with a list, YouTube labeled only 35 of them as such — ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they're published.

Tweets: @propublica and @moonalice

Samanth Subramanian / The Guardian:

As we shop more online and think less about how our purchases reach our homes, a look at how our home delivery habit is reshaping the physical world — The great trick of online retail has been to get us to shop more and think less about how our purchases reach our homes. By Samanth Subramanian

Tweets: @frankpasquale, @kinsale42, @sajithpai, and @mishdalton

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From Mediagazer

Sara Fischer / Axios:

60 Minutes' CECOT segment, pulled by Bari Weiss, was mistakenly aired in Canada via an app owned by Global Television, which airs 60 Minutes in the country

Ali Watkins / New York Times:

Channel 4 says Jimmy Kimmel will share a message on Christmas Day as part of its Alternative Christmas Message show, emphasizing the importance of free speech

Reuters:

Israel's cabinet votes to shut down popular national radio station Army Radio, saying it has become a platform for views that “attack” its armed forces

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Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:

T-Mobile says it suffered a data breach that affected over one million customers, exposing their names, billing addresses, phone numbers, and more

More: PYMNTS.com, Gizmodo, and 9to5Mac

Jordan Crook / TechCrunch:

Eden, a B2B workplace management platform that connects office managers with service providers in 25 markets including Berlin and London, raises $25M Series B

Tweets: @sameerpatel

FinSMEs:

ColdQuanta, which uses ultracold atom tech, where atoms are cooled using lasers to manufacture components for quantum computing, raises $16.75M in seed funding

Li Tao / South China Morning Post:

Profile of China-based Wingtech, the world's largest ODM for smartphones, which has shipped 51M units in H1 2019 for clients like Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi

Nathaniel Rich / Vanity Fair:

Inside the collapse of Quadriga crypto exchange, as law enforcement, accountants, and Reddit sleuths try to figure out if it was a legit operation or a scam

More: The only cryptocurrency …. Tweets: @erinoclark, @nuggetsnewsau, @adamsinger, @reformedbroker, @andymukherjee70, @morganhousel, and @mpelletiercio

Michael Kwet / VICE:

Inside Vumacam's plans to build a network of AI-powered CCTV cameras across South Africa in areas where people of color are already disproportionately targeted

Tweets: @veauxdevillian, @tshegofatso_tm, @phat_controller, and @leahk28

Earlier Picks

Joseph Cox / VICE:

Sources: authorities have arrested an alleged member of The Chuckling Squad, the group that hacked Jack Dorsey's Twitter account in August

More: Engadget, Business Insider, Axios, and DataBreaches.net

Tweets: @josephfcox and @fizzily1

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturns a lower-court order that required the suspect in a child-porn case to turn over the password to his computer

More: Yahoo Finance and The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Kashmir Hill / New York Times:

A look at the Legal Aid Society of New York City's efforts to close the tech gap between public defenders and law enforcement with respect to digital forensics

Tweets: @robinhanson, @nytimesbusiness, @nytimesbusiness, @kashhill, @byrontau, @amelia_acker, @sushantsin, @zackwhittaker, @kashhill, @geomblog, @nytimes, and @tmluongo

Cory Weinberg / The Information:

Source: Airbnb lost about $100M in Q2 2019, compared to the profit of $10M it made a year ago

Tweets: @coryweinberg, @modestproposal1, @edbott, and @eliotwb

Monica Nickelsburg / GeekWire:

Amazon filed its formal protest over JEDI on Friday, citing a Fox News segment and a Trump rally as evidence of improper political pressure from the White House

More: Washington Post, CNET, Mashable, Vox, SiliconANGLE, and Axios

Tweets: @paulkrugman, @megawatts55, and @keithboykin. Thanks:@taylor_soper

Queenie Wong / CNET:

Facebook built a now discontinued internal app, report says between 2015 and 2016, that let employees identify colleagues and friends via facial recognition

Source: Business Insider. More: Gizmodo, Engadget, SlashGear, MSPoweruser, Mashable, and VentureBeat

Tweets: @hodgesmr, @robaeprice, @saradannerdukic, @fchollet, @tonyromm, @pauldokas, @xeni, @jkarsh, @dtunkelang, @coreen_anne, @brooklynmarie, @robaeprice, @robaeprice, @clarajeffery, and @oknox