Techmeme
December 17, 2019, 3:35 PM

Top News

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
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.
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 …
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.
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 …
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.
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 …
Spencer Soper / Bloomberg:
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.
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 …
More: li.me and Engadget
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Online training startup Springboard raises $11M led by Reach Capital, partners with Microsoft to train ~5,000 students in three years for data analytics roles  —  Springboard, an education technology startup that provides training courses for people looking for in-demand technical roles …
More: EdSurge
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Instagram expands its fact checking efforts by hiding false content behind warnings, except for politicians, and removing it from Explore and hashtag pages  —  Instagram is giving politicians the same free reign to spread misinformation as its parent company Facebook.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

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Adithya Venkatraman / App Annie:
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