Techmeme
November 2, 2021, 1:55 PM

Top News

New York Times:
Meta plans to shut down Facebook's decade-old facial recognition system this month, deleting the face scan data of 1B+ users following legal and regulatory woes  —  Saying it wants “to find the right balance” with the technology, the social network will delete the face scan data of more than one billion users.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft will bring its mixed reality platform Mesh with 3D avatars and VR support to Teams in the first half of 2022  —  Microsoft and Meta are on a collision course for metaverse competition  —  Microsoft is entering the race to build a metaverse inside Teams, just days after Facebook rebranded …
Nikkei Asia:
Sources: Apple has cut back on iPad production by 50% from its original plans for the past two months, to allocate more chips to the iPhone 13  —  U.S. tech giant produces 50% fewer tablets than planned in September-October  —  TAIPEI — Apple has cut back sharply on iPad production …
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Microsoft announces Loop, an app that combines a “flexible canvas” with collaborative components that sync across Microsoft 365 services  —  Join gaming leaders online at GamesBeat Summit Next this upcoming November 9-10.  Learn more about what comes next.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
Zoom says it is testing ads on its free Basic tier; the ads appear on the browser page shown to users at the end of a call  —  They'll appear in a browser page at the end of meetings  —  Zoom is piloting showing ads to users on its free “Basic” tier, the company has announced in a blog post.
Nikkei Asia:
Sources: Nintendo will only be able to produce ~24M units of its Switch game console in FY 2021 due to chip shortages, 20% below its original plan of 30M  —  Production revised down to 24 million units for fiscal 2021 despite high demand  —  OSAKA — Nintendo will only be able to produce …
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
Researchers discover a Unicode security vulnerability that affects most code compilers, including for Go, C++, C#, JavaScript, Java, Rust, and Python  —  Virtually all compilers — programs that transform human-readable source code into computer-executable machine code …
Liza Lin / Wall Street Journal:
Yahoo pulls its services out of China in a largely symbolic gesture following LinkedIn, citing an “increasingly challenging business and legal environment”  —  Yahoo Inc. said it was pulling out of China, citing an increasingly challenging business and legal environment …
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Microsoft Edge for Linux is now available for all users, supporting multiple distributions including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE  —  It's ‘Chredge’ time for Linux: Microsoft's Edge browser is now generally available for a number of Linux distributions.
Jon Fingas / Engadget:
Microsoft will integrate the recently acquired video editing web app Clipchamp into its Office apps and add an audio “recording studio” to PowerPoint  —  Microsoft is boosting Office with some (arguably overdue) media creation tools.  As part of a sweeping set of updates …
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Lumigo, a cloud-native observability service for application monitoring and debugging, raises a $29M Series A led by Redline Capital  —  Lumigo, a cloud-native application monitoring and debugging platform, today announced that it has raised a $29 million Series A funding round led by Redline Capital.
More: Lumigo
Tage Kene-Okafor / TechCrunch:
Chipper Cash, which provides cross-border payments services in Africa, raises a $150M Series C extension led by cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX  —  Chipper Cash, an African cross-border payments company, has raised $150 million in a Series C extension round led by Sam Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Microsoft launches Dynamics 365 offerings such as cloud-powered marketing, supply chain insights, observing how people move in retail spaces, and more  —  Beyond updates across Azure, this week at its Ignite 2021 conference, Microsoft has announced additions to its Dynamics 365 business app …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Zillow is pitching institutional investors on the sale of 7K homes for ~$2.8B to recover from buying too many, which it blames on its bidding algorithm  —  - Online listing giant has been buying thousands of homes  —  Zillow Group Inc. is looking to sell about 7,000 homes as it seeks …
Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
Biden admin urges Congress to subject stablecoin issuers to federal oversight like banks and limit their interactions with non-financial companies, such as Meta  —  If U.S. lawmakers don't act, regulators have the authority to take their own measures, according to the long-awaited report …
Financial Times:
Meta takes down a troll farm run by the Nicaraguan government since 2018 that involved 937 Facebook accounts, 140 Pages, 24 Groups, and 363 Instagram accounts  —  Company says it took down hundreds of accounts, pages and groups ahead of Sunday's election  —  Meta's Facebook has accused …

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Mars W. Mosqueda Jr / DealStreetAsia:
Zheping Huang / Bloomberg:
Paul Vigna / Wall Street Journal:
Andrew Tarantola / Engadget:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: