Techmeme
March 3, 2020, 3:15 AM

Top News

Jay Peters / The Verge:
Facebook and Twitter pull out of the SXSW conference citing COVID-19 concerns; event organisers say the conference is proceeding as planned  —  Twitter pulled out earlier today  —  Facebook has pulled out of the upcoming SXSW conference in Austin, TX, according to a company statement given to Business Insider.
Olivia Carville / Bloomberg:
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Waymo raises $2.25B from Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, parent-company Alphabet, and others to scale up its autonomous vehicles operations  —  Waymo, the autonomous vehicles division of Google parent company Alphabet, just got a massive capital infusion from a coterie of investors.
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Report: senior management at Apple rebuffed some operations execs' suggestion to relocate part of its manufacturing from China to Vietnam as early as 2015  —  Production on Apple's devices has been stymied in recent weeks due to delays caused by the coronavirus outbreak in China.
Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
Behind Facebook's rewrite of Messenger, going live today, that has shrunk the iOS app's size from 130MB to 30MB and its codebase from 1.7M to 360K lines of code  —  To make its iPhone messaging app run better—especially on older phones—Facebook rewrote it from the ground up.  The new version is going live now.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Google updates Pixel phones with new Motion Sense gesture controls, emoji, AR effects, car crash detection for its Personal Safety app, photo and video features  —  One of the benefits of owning a Pixel smartphone is that it improves over time as Pixels are first to receive updates that deliver the latest fixes and improvements.
Jonathan Stempel / Reuters:
Apple agrees to pay up to $500M to settle a US class-action lawsuit accusing it of quietly slowing down older iPhones  —  (Reuters) - Apple Inc (AAPL.O) has agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle litigation accusing it of quietly slowing down older iPhones as it launched new models …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
US sanctions two Chinese nationals for allegedly laundering cryptocurrency for North Korea's Lazarus Group, which has hacked two crypto exchanges since 2018  —  Two Chinese men laundered funds from two hacked cryptocurrency exchanges.  —  The US Treasury Department imposed sanctions today …
Hartley Charlton / MacRumors:
Report: Apple and its suppliers are among the 83 big companies benefitting from China's abusive labor transfer programs for Uyghur Muslims and other minorities  —  A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think-tank has named Apple among 83 other major companies benefiting …
Bloomberg:
Robinhood says it has been experiencing a “system-wide outage” today that it is affecting “all functionalities” on the platform  —  - Issue has been identified and fix is under way, company says  — Some customers of online broker couldn't access their accounts
Natalie Gagliordi / ZDNet:
BMC to acquire its longtime mainframe software competitor Compuware from Thoma Bravo for an undisclosed sum; Thoma Bravo bought Compuware in 2014 for $2.4B  —  Together they plan to focus on mainframe operations, cybersecurity, application development, data, and storage.
Jack Nicas / New York Times:
Study: YouTube has reduced recommendations of some conspiracy theories like flat earth and QAnon but has let others flourish for topics like climate change  —  A new study examines YouTube's efforts to limit the spread of conspiracy theories on its site, from videos claiming the end times are near to those questioning climate change.
Brian Deagon / Investor's Business Daily:
JD.com beats estimates with Q4 net revenue of $24.5B, up 26.6% YoY, says it expects Q1 revenue to increase “at least 10%” YoY to ~$19.09B amid COVID-19 concerns  —  Shares of China e-commerce giant JD.com (JD) shot up Monday after the company reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter results.
Chris Welch / The Verge:
AT&T TV launches across the US after rolling out in over a dozen markets last year, with prices that start at $49.99/month but go up dramatically after a year  —  AT&T's next big TV play has a problem: pricing  —  AT&T TV is launching nationwide today after initially rolling out to over a dozen markets last year.

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Earlier Picks

Financial Times:
Thomas Ricker / The Verge:
Casey Newton / The Verge:
New York Times: