Techmeme
December 14, 2019, 8:30 PM

Top News

New Orleans Times-Picayune:
New Orleans declares state of emergency, shuts down its network after a ransomware attack on Friday, says it had found no signs that data was lost in the attack  —  Collin Arnold, the Director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, speaks during the press conference …
Jeff John Roberts / Fortune:
Researchers claim they used 3D masks and photos to deceive facial recognition systems used by Alipay, WeChat Pay, Schiphol Airport, and train stations in China  —  Masks and simple photographs are enough to fool some facial recognition technology, highlighting a major shortcoming in what is billed as a more effective security tool.
Brian Merchant / Harper's Magazine:
A look at the rise of murder-for-hire marketplaces on the dark web, the vast majority of which are schemes to pilfer money from gullible users  —  The dark world of online murder markets  —  On a sunny July day in 2018, Alexis Stern was sitting behind the wheel of the red Ford Fusion …
Jonathan Vanian / Fortune:
Q&A with Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins about its new business line - standalone networking chips to win big datacenter clients like Facebook and Microsoft  —  Cisco is best known for selling routers and switches, but now the networking giant is expanding into the highly-competitive business of selling computer chips.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft's next-gen “Project Scarlett” Xbox to be called Xbox Series X and available holiday 2020 with support for frame rates of up to 120 fps and ray tracing  —  Xbox now looks like a PC  —  Microsoft's next-generation Xbox is officially called Xbox Series X. Microsoft revealed …
Zen Soo / South China Morning Post:
Grab says that food and financial services, which have better margins than ride-hailing, now generate more than 50% of its gross merchandise volume  —  Food and financial services now make up more than 50 per cent of Grab's gross merchandise volume, according to Lim Kell Jay …
Financial Times:
Fintech startups in Asia are proving to be formidable competitors to traditional banks, offering a slew of financial services, but many are bleeding cash  —  Rice Basket Queen is the name of a stall run by Ruri Ruhyaty in a bustling suburb of Jakarta.  A year ago it was typical of thousands of others.
Simone Stolzoff / The Atlantic:
A graduate of Slack's Next Chapter initiative, which helps former prison inmates land tech jobs, recounts how he managed to land a full-time job at the company  —  Jesse Aguirre's workday at Slack starts with a standard engineering meeting—programmers call them “standups”—where he and his co-workers plan the day's agenda.
Michael Sheetz / CNBC:
Morgan Stanley estimates Amazon is delivering half of its US packages, will soon pass UPS and FedEx in total volume, at a current rate of 2.5B packages a year  —  - Amazon Logistics is the e-commerce giant's in-house logistics operation.  — “Our AlphaWise analysis shows …

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More News

Amanda Mull / The Atlantic:

Earlier Picks

Polina Marinova / Fortune:
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Richard Nieva / CNET:
Reuters: