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December 17, 2019, 5:05 PM
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| Wall Street Journal: |
Sources describe Peter Thiel's expanding influence at Facebook, where he advises Zuckerberg on White House dynamics and holding firm on the political ads policy — Billionaire investor thinks political-ad policy shouldn't change; some directors and executives disagree
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Business Insider, Mercury News, CNET, CNBC, and Seeking Alpha
| Daniel Cooper / Engadget: |
Googler says she was fired for sending pop-ups on labor rights via modified internal browser plugin; Google: she “abused privileged access” in altering the tool — Google stands accused of firing a fifth employee who was suspected of attempting to organize a labor union at the search giant.
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Kathryn Spiers, The Verge, NBC News, The Guardian, The Guardian, Bloomberg, Telegraph, Mercury News, Ars Technica, Forbes, Boing Boing, The Daily Dot, VICE, CNET, Axios, and Input
| iFixit News: |
Mac Pro needs little to no tooling for basic fixes and upgrades, scores a 9/10 on repairability; components are modular but some are proprietary, like SSD cards — Teardown of the reinvented 2019 Mac Pro, which returns to a properly repairable design that happens to not grate cheese very well.
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Ars Technica, The Verge, Daring Fireball, The Register, Yahoo Finance, MacDailyNews, iDownloadBlog.com, CNET, SlashGear, 9to5Mac, MacRumors, iPhone Hacks, MSPoweruser, AppleInsider, Cult of Mac, and iPhone in Canada Blog
Tweets: @ifixit, @ifixit, @kkiyer90, @johnbbeta, and @fanlesstech
| Bret Kinsella / Voicebot.ai: |
Report: Amazon had revenue of $1.4M from Alexa's in-skill purchases in the first ten months of 2019, which was well short of its target of $5.5M — The Information published (N.B. paywall) an article this morning saying that Amazon earned $1.4 million Alexa skill revenue through the first 10 months …
Source:
The Information. More:
Daring Fireball, Variety, and Seeking Alpha
Tweets: @priyasideas, @nickbastone, @mcwm, @mcclure111, @zerohedge, @nachkari, @mattmday, @mathewi, @nickwingfield, @mathewi, @kantrowitz, and @amir
| Sara Fischer / Axios: |
Facebook is piloting a program in US to leverage part-time contracted “community reviewers” to expedite its fact-checking process, aiding fact-checking partners — Facebook is creating a new pilot program in the U.S. that will leverage part-time contracted “community reviewers” to expedite its fact-checking process.
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About Facebook, CNET, and Seeking Alpha
| Josh Constine / TechCrunch: |
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About Facebook, Washington Post, Engadget, Input, Geek.com, Quartz, Inc42 Media, The Mac Observer, iPhone in Canada Blog, Adweek, Mashable, 9to5Mac, The Daily Dot, and Social Media Today
Tweets: @blakersdozen, @alexeheath, @b52malmet, @joshconstine, @joshconstine, and @jasonabbruzzese
| The Information: |
Sources: early last year, Alphabet and Google's leadership set a timeline for its cloud group to best its rivals by 2023, and considered leaving the market — Google's cloud unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon …
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CNBC, MSPoweruser, and Seeking Alpha
Tweets: @willhamill, @migueldeicaza, @kmclaughlinsf, @traskjd, @krishnan, @nickwingfield, @jny, @mhbergen, @ryan, @amir, @petebray, and @jessicalessin
| Danny Palmer / ZDNet: |
WhatsApp fixes bug that allowed a rogue group member to render the app unusable, forcing a reinstall and loss of group chat content — Researchers detail security flaw that allowed hackers to crash WhatsApp and permanently delete contents of group chats - and urge users to update the app to protect against attacks.| Luke Jones / WinBuzzer: |
Microsoft opens the Microsoft Edge Addons store for submissions ahead of Chromium-based Edge launch — Developers can now submit to the Microsoft Edge Addons Store, with existing Chromium extensions migrated automatically. — Microsoft has today announced the Microsoft Edge Addons store is now fully open.
More:
TECHCOMMUNITY.MICROSOFT.COM, Windows Blog, ZDNet, TechRadar.com, Thurrott, AskWoody, Input, Ausdroid, Redmond, gHacks Technology News, Neowin, Windows Central, MSPoweruser, and OnMSFT.com
Tweets: @qmatteoq and @msedgedev
| Mayank Parmar / Windows Latest: |
More:
Computerworld, Microsoft Docs, BleepingComputer, ExtremeTech, Lifehacker, Thurrott, OnMSFT.com, The Next Web, and MSPoweruser. Thanks:@windowslatest
| LogMeIn, Inc.: |
LogMeIn to be acquired by affiliates of PE firm Francisco Partners and Elliott Management for $86.05/share in cash, valuing the company at ~$4.3B — All-Cash Transaction Valued at Approximately $4.3 Billion — LogMeIn, Inc. (NASDAQ: LOGM), a leading provider of cloud-based connectivity …
| Paul Ziobro / Wall Street Journal: |
Amazon blocks marketplace sellers from using FedEx Ground for Prime shipments indefinitely over FedEx's “delivery performance” — Amazon cites a decline in FedEx performance heading into the final holiday push — Amazon.com Inc. AMZN .47% is blocking its third-party sellers …
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International Business Times, TechCrunch, CNBC, PYMNTS.com, The Digital Reader, KnowTechie, Input, TheStreet, New York Post, Reuters, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, CNBC, SlashGear, TechSpot, Ars Technica, The Verge, CNN, Associated Press, CNET, PYMNTS.com, Bloomberg, Adweek, GeekWire, Seeking Alpha, Business Insider, and Politico
Tweets: @halsinger, @wsakaren, @mcwm, @matthewkeyslive, @oliviabvoz, @alex, @harrymccracken, and @avajoyewjz
| Spencer Soper / Bloomberg: |
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CNBC. Tweets: @business, @business, @yadav_supplychn, @ericnewcomer, @mcwm, @business, @rrpre, and @shiraovide
| Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch: |
Skyryse demos its Skyryse Flight Stack, which enables existing helicopters to be flown autonomously, says it has raised a total of $38M in funding to date — Skyryse is a three-year old transportation startup that is approaching the future of aviation from a different angle when compared to most.| Joseph Cox / VICE: |
Ring device testing shows it lacks safeguards that would deter credential stuffing and brute force attacks, making 2FA a key part of securing accounts — It's not so much being watched. It's that I don't really know if I'm being watched or not. — From across the other side of the world …
More:
NBC News, Stacey on IoT, Business Insider, and Softpedia News
Tweets: @josephfcox, @josephfcox, @josephfcox, @josephfcox, @mozilla, @gossithedog, @gossithedog, @dinodaizovi, @josephfcox, @josephfcox, @brookejarvis, and @gossithedog
| Sara Fischer / Axios: |
Facebook is funding a free 45-minute online Reuters course for journalists on spotting and handling manipulated media, now in English, French, Spanish, Arabic — Facebook is spending six figures to fund a course on manipulated media and deepfakes for newsrooms, executives tell Axios.| Romain Dillet / TechCrunch: |
Hugging Face, which recently found success with its open-source NLP library after debuting an app that let users chat with an artificial friend, raises $15M — Hugging Face has raised a $15 million funding round led by Lux Capital. The company first built a mobile app that let you chat …
More:
Medium
| Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed News: |
Ex-Facebook staffers on how Facebook's focus on growth metrics in performance reviews prodded staff to game the system and ignore other impacts of their work — Facebook often uses its vast size as an excuse for its failures. Meanwhile, it's ordering employees to make it bigger.
Tweets: @kantrowitz and @buzzfeednews
| Jon Porter / The Verge: |
Lime launches LimePass, a $5/week subscription service that waves the scooter and bike unlock fees; users still pay the per-minute charge for rides — LimePass waves the unlock fee on your rentals — Lime just announced LimePass, a weekly subscription service that waves the unlock fee … Sponsor Posts
Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference — Stop preparing for agents. Start running them. 100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference — Stop preparing for agents. Start running them. 100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
App Spotlight: Google Sheets Magic Lookup for Zoho CRM — Our App Spotlight brings you hand-picked apps to enhance the power of your Zoho apps and tools. Visit Zoho Marketplace to explore all apps, integrations …
App Spotlight: Google Sheets Magic Lookup for Zoho CRM — Our App Spotlight brings you hand-picked apps to enhance the power of your Zoho apps and tools. Visit Zoho Marketplace to explore all apps, integrations …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.Featured Podcasts
Acquired:
Home Depot
Learn the playbooks that built the world's greatest companies - and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.
Subscribe to Acquired.
Big Technology Podcast:
Special Report: Will AI Wipe Out Humanity? (And Who Profits)
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
The Atlantic's CEO on AI, Billionaire Owners, and Moonlighting as a Creator
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Sources:
Mark Zuckerberg on Muse, Meta's biggest AI bet yet
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Lenny's Podcast:
How we built Grok Bot in a month | Roman Ugarte (SpaceXAI)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Invest Like the Best:
Walter Russell Mead - How America Keeps Winning
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
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