Techmeme
February 29, 2020, 11:00 AM

Top News

Polygon:
Organizers announce that this year's Game Developers Conference has been postponed from March to summer amid COVID-19 concerns  —  Sony, EA, Activision Blizzard, Unity, and Epic Games have all withdrawn due to COVID-19 concerns  —  This year's Game Developers Conference has been postponed …
Nicole Wetsman / The Verge:
Amazon restricts employee travel in US, Google restricts travel to Italy, Iran, Japan, and South Korea as a Google employee in Zurich is diagnosed with COVID-19  —  A Google employee in Switzerland has a confirmed case of the virus  —  Google is preventing employees from traveling to Italy …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Elliott Management has taken a “sizable” stake in Twitter, nominated four directors to Twitter's board, and seeks to replace CEO Jack Dorsey  —  - Elliott has nominated four directors for Twitter's board  — Hedge fund has had ‘constructive discussions’ with company
BuzzFeed News:
Apple disables the iOS developer account of Clearview AI for using the Developer Enterprise Program to distribute its app among its reported 2,200+ customers  —  Apple has disabled the iOS application of Clearview AI — the facial recognition company that claims to have amassed a database …
Sean Endicott / Windows Central:
Microsoft adds productivity features to Cortana, drops consumer skills including music, connected home, and third-party skills in the upcoming Windows 10 update  —  Cortana is converting to a productivity assistant, meaning Cortana skills are on the way out.  —  What you need to know
Margaret Harding McGill / Axios:
FCC proposes fines of $91M for T-Mobile, $57M for AT&T, $48M for Verizon, and $12M for Sprint for sharing customers' location information with outside parties  —  The Federal Communications Commission proposed fines totaling more than $200 million against the nation's biggest wireless carriers …
DL Cade / PetaPixel:
Facebook says its 3D Photos feature, which retroactively converts 2D photos to 3D using neural nets, now works on photos taken with single-lens cameras  —  Facebook just expanded 3D photo posting to phones that don't actually capture depth data.  Using the magic of machine learning …
Dan Primack / Axios:
Bernie Sanders introduces a bill that would tax stock options at vesting, not at exercise, for those making $130K+ and vesting $100K+ worth of stock per year  —  'Sens. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) introduced legislation that would tax nonqualified stock options at vesting …
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook to start rolling out a redesign for Messenger next week that removes the Discover tab, reorients the People tab around Stories, and hides chat bots  —  Chat bots were central to Facebook Messenger's strategy three years ago.  Now they're being hidden from view in the app along with games and businesses.
Josh Dzieza / The Verge:
In warehouses, call centers, and elsewhere, intelligent machines are managing humans, and they're making work more stressful, grueling, and dangerous  —  In warehouses, call centers, and other sectors, intelligent machines are managing humans, and they're making work more stressful, grueling, and dangerous
Business Insider:
Investigation: several staff members of the Chan-Zuckerberg family office have made allegations of assault, sexual harassment, and more, against other staff  —  KAUAI, Hawaii — One minute before midnight on December 29, 2017, one of Mark Zuckerberg's personal staffers got a phone call.
Alex Lee / Wired:
A look at the TranscribersOfReddit subreddit where 3,186 volunteers write elaborate transcriptions of memes, videos, and images to make the site more accessible  —  To help Redditors with visual impairments, volunteers are writing elaborate transcriptions of memes and images across the site.

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Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:
CNN:
Dieter Bohn / The Verge: