Latest Techmeme Headlines Today
July 04, 2020
Read latest business technology news headlines from Techmeme today, including market trends, world’s economy, companies, advancements, multimedia, electronics, mobile technologies, sciences and lots more.
- Analysts say that under the new security law, Hong Kong police won't need court orders to force ISPs to help with investigations or remove information (Phila Siu/South China Morning Post)
- Uber partners with three local cab companies to launch a taxi dispatch service in Tokyo, six years after entering Japan (Bloomberg)
- Internet Association publishes a wish list for a UK-US trade deal, including no unilateral digital taxes and protecting "intermediary liability protections" (Stefan Boscia/CityAM)
- LinkedIn says its iOS app is copying the contents of users' clipboards after every key press due to a bug and promises a fix, after iOS 14 reveals the snooping (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
- WhatsApp's private group structure encourages spread of misinfo and conspiracy theories as it enables higher levels of trust and solidarity among group members (William Davies/The Guardian)
- Apple is pulling away from the competition to a degree never seen before and has years worth of competitive advantage in emerging categories like wearables (Neil Cybart/Above Avalon)
- UK government and India's Bharti Enterprises win an auction for bankrupt satellite broadband operator OneWeb for $1B; the parties will own a 45% stake each (Financial Times)
- Instacart raises $100M in new funding from T. Rowe Price, on top of the $225M round co-led by DST Global and General Catalyst last month (Dan Primack/Axios)
- Taiwan's Foxconn says customs clearing procedures in India have been resolved (Yimou Lee/Reuters)
- European advertising associations criticize Apple's plans to require apps to seek additional permission before tracking users across other apps and websites (Reuters)
- Mozilla updates Common Voice, its open source transcribed voice collection, to 7226 hours in 54 languages, releases first data set for "Hey Firefox" wake word (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)
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Intel Capital to invest $253.5M in Jio Platforms for a 0.39% stake, giving the Indian firm a valuation of $65B (Manish Singh/TechCrunch) Advertisement
- Streaming TV services' inability to negotiate their way out of the bundle system that has dominated regular cable for years is resulting in higher prices (Chaim Gartenberg/The Verge)
- India's Reliance Jio launches JioMeet, a Zoom-like video-conference service, offering unlimited free calls in 720p with up to 100 participants and no time limit (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)
- Caffeine, which aims to compete with Twitch but focuses on content like rap battles, has raised $113M, led by Fox Corp, Cox Enterprises, and Sanabil Investments (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)
- Companies have little to lose from joining a Facebook boycott during a slow month for ads amid a pandemic; they'll be back, and Facebook will emerge stronger (Jack Shafer/Politico)
- Seattle-based Accolade, a health care platform for employees to manage benefits, raises $220M in its IPO at a $1.2B valuation; stock up ~35% at market close (Elise Reuter/MedCity News)
- Angry over critical coverage, tech figures discuss hitting back against journalists, on Twitter and invite-only Clubhouse, leading to harassment of NYT's Lorenz (Jason Koebler/VICE)
- Lemonade, an AI-driven insurance service, closes up 140% in its NYSE debut, reaching a $3.93B market cap, more than double its 2019 valuation from Softbank (Wallace Witkowski/MarketWatch)
- OTF staff worry about losing trust globally as the new CEO of its parent agency is pressed to divert funds from open-source tech to obscure, closed-source tech (David Gilbert/VICE)
- Microsoft is using ransomware-like tactics to force-feed its new Chromium Edge browser to users through an automatic Windows update (Sean Hollister/The Verge)
- To curb party houses, Airbnb says users younger than 25 will not be able to book entire houses in their area if they have fewer than three positive reviews (Catie Keck/Gizmodo)
- Report: Amazon is moving Prime Day again to October, after first moving it to September, amid concerns over how coronavirus spikes may impact the supply chain (Carrie Mihalcik/CNET)
- Apple launches a new site for Apple Card users to manage their accounts online; previously, all Apple Card interactions took place through iPhone's Wallet app (Benjamin Mayo/9to5Mac)
- CBP awards Anduril, founded by Palantir veterans and Palmer Luckey, a five-year contract to build a "virtual border wall" using mobile surveillance towers (Nick Miroff/Washington Post)
- Facebook says it will add messaging to its News Feed and Instagram's feed to encourage people to wear face masks, with links to COVID-19 Info Center and CDC (Kim Lyons/The Verge)
- An African American manager and two job applicants filed a complaint against Facebook with the EEOC, alleging a culture of bias against Black workers (Elizabeth Dwoskin/Washington Post)
- The EU is examining whether Google's proposed acquisition of Fitbit will give the company more data to entrench its search engine and advertising businesses (Javier Espinoza/Financial Times)
- Facebook says it continued sharing data of inactive users with around 5,000 developers even after their apps' 90-day cut-off date expired; issue is now fixed (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
- A mystery shopper who irked online merchants by abandoning thousands of shopping carts carrying only one item was a Google bot scraping pricing information (Paul Ziobro/Wall Street Journal)
- Facebook says it will pin a voter registration information box at the top of the News Feed for every US user of voting age starting July 3 (Jay Peters/The Verge)
- Police infiltrated an encrypted phone network used by organized crime and read millions of messages in real time for months, leading to international arrests (Joseph Cox/VICE)
- Sources: India's additional scrutiny of imports from China is causing delays in operations at plants owned by Foxconn and impacting other companies like Dell (Aditya Kalra/Reuters)
- Researchers expose a flaw in at least three major crypto wallets, Ledger Live, Edge, and Breadwallet, which could be exploited for double spending users' funds (Daniel Kuhn/CoinDesk)
- California regulators have sued Cisco Systems, saying an engineer faced discrimination because he is a Dalit, the lowest caste in the Indian caste system (Tali Arbel/Associated Press)
- A look at Prison TikTok, a subgenre where inmates use contraband cellphones to share dance videos, funny skits, and broadcast info about their living conditions (Louise Matsakis/Wired)
- COVID-19 is amplifying the cybersecurity risks for schools as they move to distance learning; they were already at risk due to a lack of dedicated funding (Lily Hay Newman/Wired)
- Analysis of 1B+ leaked credentials: "123456" accounts for one out of every 142 passwords, making it the most commonly reused password over the last five years (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
- Facebook says it is shutting down Lasso, its TikTok clone launched a year and a half ago, on July 10 (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)
- Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell and executive Matt Hansen discuss Mountaintop, their new studio focused on multiplayer games (James Batchelor/GamesIndustry.biz)
- TuSimple is partnering with UPS and others to create a mapped network of shipping routes for its fleet of self-driving trucks that will extend across US by 2024 (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)
- Twitter removed a picture from a Trump tweet after receiving a DMCA complaint from the NYT, which owns the rights to the photo taken in 2015 (Sara Fischer/Axios)
- VMware to acquire Datrium, which provides disaster recovery services for hybrid cloud environments, for an undisclosed sum; Datrium had previously raised $170M (Joseph Tsidulko/CRN)
- Google says it has discontinued the Pixel 3a and 3a XL, with remaining stock only available through 3rd parties; Google has yet to announce a rumored successor (David Ruddock/Android Police)
- Dish has completed its acquisition of Boost Mobile from T-Mobile in a deal worth $1.4B (Jacob Kastrenakes/The Verge)
- Sources: Zuckerberg told Facebook staff the ad boycott is more of a "reputational and a partner issue" than an economic one, expects advertisers to return soon (Alex Heath/The Information)
- As part of UK antitrust investigation of Google, the CMA says Google being default Safari search engine is "a significant barrier to entry" for Google's rivals (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)
- Rep. David Cicilline says Tim Cook will testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee in late July, alongside Facebook, Amazon, and Google CEOs (Mikey Campbell/AppleInsider)
- Vendia, founded by two AWS executives and aiming to build a multi-cloud serverless platform, raises $5.1M seed led by Neotribe's Swaroop Kolluri (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)
- WhatsApp announces contact-adding QR codes, animated stickers, dark mode for desktop and web, and a new group calling button (Jon Porter/The Verge)
- Ahead of a key contract renewal date, activists are pushing to end facial recognition use in Detroit, the US city with the highest percentage of Black residents (Alfred Ng/CNET)
- Anduril Industries, founded by Palantir veterans and Palmer Luckey, raises $200M led by a16z at a $1.9B valuation for its AI-powered drone and surveillance tech (Joshua Brustein/Bloomberg)
- Apple says it will close 30 more US retail stores as COVID-19 cases spike, bringing the total re-closed stores in the US to 77 in recent weeks (Kif Leswing/CNBC)
- Curv, which is building secure crypto custody management tools, raises $23M Series A from CommerzVentures, Coinbase Ventures, and others (Ian Allison/CoinDesk)
- Of the top 25 Facebook advertisers in 2019, which include Uber and Netflix, only three, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Pfizer, have said they are pausing ad spending (CNN)
- Researchers from Salesforce and Univ. of Virginia propose a new way to mitigate gender bias in word embeddings, the word representations used to train AI models (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)
- Employees at tech companies say NDAs, widely used across the industry, are muzzling those who have endured racism and discrimination (Emily Birnbaum/Protocol)
- Zoom has missed its self-imposed June 30 deadline to disclose government data requests, pushing it back to "later this year" (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
- MIT apologizes and takes down its 80M-strong AI image training dataset, scraped from Google Images, that labeled some images with racist and misogynistic terms (Katyanna Quach/The Register)
- Report: Twitch crossed 5B hours watched in Q2, up 62.7% QoQ and 83.1% YoY; YouTube Gaming Live grew 39.6% QoQ to reach 1.5B hours (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- Dun & Bradstreet, one of Wall Street's oldest data and analytics providers, raises $1.7B in its IPO, valuing the company at $8.8B (Bloomberg)
- Shenzhen-based Pudu Technology raises $15M Series B to develop autonomous indoor delivery robots (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)
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Source: following Amazon's acquisition, two of Zoox's earliest and most senior engineers have left for Waymo (Amir Efrati/The Information) Advertisement
- Canadian Intelligence officials say China hacked Nortel, once a world leader in wireless tech, starting in the late 1990s, to promote companies like Huawei (Natalie Obiko Pearson/Bloomberg)
- TransferWise says it has been given permission by UK regulators to offer investment products in the future (Steve O'Hear/TechCrunch)
- Amazon Game Studios pulls its free-to-play PC title Crucible from wide circulation following negative reviews, an exceedingly rare step for a big-budget game (Matt Day/Bloomberg)
- Fauna, which wants to make adding a database a simple API call, adds $27M to its $25M Series A, bringing its total raised to $57M (Ron Miller/TechCrunch)
- SCOTUS rules 8-1 in favor of letting online companies trademark generic names, siding with Booking.com and rejecting federal government restrictions (Brent Kendall/Wall Street Journal)
- Sources: Google told European publishers it will cut them off from its ad tools if they block it from harvesting their reader data (Paresh Dave/Reuters)
- Apple freezes updates for tens of thousands of mobile games on the App Store in China, closing a widely used loophole, to comply with licensing regulations (Yuan Yang/Financial Times)
- Chicago-based The Mom Project, a job site aimed at women returning to work, raises $25M Series B led by 7CG, bringing its total raised to $36M (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
- Over 400 advertisers are due to suspend Facebook ads on Wednesday for a month, as sources say talks broke down; Zuckerberg will meet boycott organizers (Reuters)
- UK's Competition and Markets Authority calls for a "pro-competition regulatory regime" to monitor Facebook, Google, and other digital ad giants (Nick Summers/Engadget)
- Over fifteen journalists describe covering Facebook, which they say lies on the record, has ghost-written op-eds, and received quote approval for interviews (Jacob Silverman/Columbia Journalism ...)
- Yann LeCun, Facebook's chief AI Scientist and Turing Award winner, quits Twitter after getting involved in an acrimonious debate regarding racial biases in AI (Synced)
- Researchers say China's mobile hacking campaign against the Uighurs was broader and more aggressive than previously known, and began as far back as 2013 (New York Times)
- Facebook shuts down Hobbi, its experimental Pinterest-like app for documenting personal projects and hobbies (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- Leaked memo: Google will not reopen its US offices until September 7 at the earliest, pushing back its earlier plan to bring some workers back starting July 6 (Gerrit De Vynck/Bloomberg)
- California will enforce its digital privacy law, which went into effect on January 1, starting today, despite industry calls for delay because of the pandemic (Rachel Lerman/Washington Post)
- Spotify expands its Premium Duo plan, which allows ad-free streaming for two people for $12.99 per month, to 55 markets including the US (Billy Steele/Engadget)
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