Techmeme
March 3, 2020, 12:10 PM

Top News

Jay Peters / The Verge:
Facebook and Twitter pull out of the SXSW conference citing COVID-19 concerns; event organizers 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.
Sam Dean / Los Angeles Times:
Twitter says it strongly encourages its 4,800 employees to work from home to avoid spreading coronavirus, the first major US company to do so  —  Twitter on Monday became the first major U.S. corporation to strongly encourage its employees to work from home to avoid spreading coronavirus.
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.
Bloomberg:
iPhone maker Foxconn says it expects its Chinese plants to begin operating normally by the end of March, after the disruption caused by the coronavirus  —  - Hon Hai says its facilities are at 50% seasonal capacity  — The epidemic has disrupted Apple's finely tuned supply chain
Kate Rooney / CNBC:
Larry Dignan / ZDNet:
Honeywell says it will launch a quantum computer within three months with a quantum volume of at least 64, the world's most powerful quantum computer  —  Under Honeywell's quantum plans, customers will connect directly to systems housed by the company.  Honeywell will use quantum computing …
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  —  UPDATE: The Department of Justice has also indicted the two Chinese nationals on money laundering-related charges.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
UnitQ raises $11M Series A, led by Google's Gradient Ventures, to spot bugs in user reports with natural language processing  —  As of early 2018, only 21% of bugs found during software testing were fixed immediately, according to Statista.  It's the belief of Christian Wiklund, David Eklov …
More: FinSMEs
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
A look at Cryptolaemus, a group of security researchers and administrators fighting the Emotet malware, currently one of the most dangerous malware operations  —  A private group of 20+ security researchers and system administrators have been waging a silent war against Emotet, today's most dangerous malware operation.

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Earlier Picks

About Facebook:
Jonathan Stempel / Reuters:
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Financial Times: