Techmeme
May 19, 2020, 1:00 PM

Top News

Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Microsoft announces Project Reunion, its latest attempt to unify the Windows developer platform by reducing fragmentation between Win32 and UWP APIs  —  At Build 2020 today, Microsoft unveiled Project Reunion, its latest attempt to unify the Windows developer platform by reducing fragmentation …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple is buying older movies and shows for Apple TV+ to build a back catalog; as of February it had ~10M subscribers but only half actively used it  —  - Company wants to create back catalog to complement originals  — TV+, launched in November, had 10 million sign-ups by February
Campbell Kwan / ZDNet:
Tom Krazit / Protocol:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft announces the Fluid Framework, a new type of Office document built around collaborative Lego-like blocks on the web, and says it will be open source  —  Microsoft is creating a new kind of Office document.  Instead of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the company has created Lego blocks of Office content that live on the web.
BBC:
Budget airline EasyJet says email addresses and travel details of 9M passengers were stolen and credit card details of 2,208 customers were accessed  —  EasyJet has admitted that a “highly sophisticated cyber-attack” has affected approximately nine million customers.
Steve Dent / Engadget:
Samsung announces a 50-megapixel smartphone sensor promising faster “DSLR-level auto-focus speeds” and better low-light image quality  —  Samsung has unveiled a new smartphone sensor showing that more megapixels may not always be better.  The ISOCELL GN1 is “only” a 50-megapixel sensor …
New York Times:
Disney's top streaming exec, Kevin Mayer, resigns to become CEO of TikTok and COO of parent company ByteDance; Disney names Rebecca Campbell as his successor  —  Kevin Mayer will lead the Chinese-owned app for making and sharing short videos, which has exploded in popularity during the pandemic.
The Verge:
Interview with Sundar Pichai on Google's diversity, long-term plans for its hardware division, the pandemic's effect on its ads business, and more  —  Like all big tech companies, Google and Alphabet are playing an outsized role in our lives as the coronavirus pandemic continues.
Michael Potuck / 9to5Mac:
AG Barr says that, “no thanks to Apple”, the FBI succeeded in unlocking the “phones” of the Pensacola gunman, who they found had significant links to Al Qaeda  —  It looks like the most recent contention between the FBI and Apple over device encryption has come to an end …
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Google launches Chrome 83 with updated safety and privacy settings, third-party cookies blocked in Incognito mode, DNS-over-HTTPS support, and new dev features  —  Google today launched Chrome 83 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS.  Chrome 83 includes redesigned safety and privacy settings …
Natasha Mascarenhas / TechCrunch:
Brex, which offers a credit card tailored to startups, raises $150M in a Series C extension  —  Fast-growing fintech behemoth Brex is raising big money as its customer base itself — high-growth and spendy startups — is struggling.  —  The company, which sells a credit card tailored for startups …
More: FinSMEs and PYMNTS.com
Richard Speed / The Register:
At an MIT event, Microsoft president Brad Smith says the company was “on the wrong side of history” with open source  —  Tell-all with president Brad Smith reveals Obama warned tech giants that a privacy reckoning was coming  —  Microsoft president Brad Smith (pictured) …
Brian Merchant / OneZero:
Google says it will not “build custom AI/ML algorithms to facilitate upstream extraction in the oil and gas industry”  —  A Greenpeace report details Silicon Valley's ties to Big Oil — and spurs Google to take a step toward opting out  —  After a year of weathering criticism …
David Meyer / Fortune:
Germany's Federal Constitutional Court rules that spying on the Frankfurt exchange's global internet traffic by the BND, its intelligence agency, is illegal  —  In the world of online spying, great power lies with those who can get their hands on the data flowing through the world's Internet infrastructure.
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Event software startup Bevy.com raises $15M Series B as it shifts gears to power virtual events, says Duolingo has hosted 1,000 events with it in past six weeks  —  This might seem like the worst time to be building an event software business, but it seems to be working for Bevy.com …
More: ReadWrite

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Ashley Carman / The Verge:
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Oculus: