Tech News
Tech News and Analysis from around the web
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Self-driving startup Wayve, which considers sophisticated sensor tech like lidar unnecessary for safe autonomous driving systems, raises $20M Series A — Wayve, a U.K.-based startup that's developing artificial intelligence (AI) that teaches cars to drive autonomously using reinforcement learning …
Nikkei Asian Review:
Line and SoftBank's Yahoo Japan announce merger plan, aim to sign a deal by December 2019, and integrate the businesses by October 2020 — SoftBank and Naver's venture to be Japan's largest online player — TOKYO — The operators of Yahoo sites in Japan and the Line chat app jointly announced …
Anna Nicolaou / Financial Times:
Sources: ByteDance is in talks with record companies to launch a music streaming service as soon as next month, would debut it initially in Brazil, India, more — The Chinese company behind the popular video app TikTok is set to go head-to-head with the likes of Spotify and Apple …
Dylan Martin / CRN:
Intel unveils plans for a 7nm Xe GPU, codenamed Ponte Vecchio, meant to rival Nvidia in handling datacenter AI workloads, but fails to give a release window — The upcoming data center GPU, in combination with its new oneAPI programming interface, will give Intel more ammunition to compete …
Andrew Allemann / Domain Name Wire:
After ICANN lifted price caps on .org domains in June, the Internet Society has sold Public Interest Registry, the top level domain's operator, to PE firm Ethos — Ethos Capital, led by former ABRY Partners Managing Partner, buys .Org registry. — I thought this might happen. And now it has.
Eric Rosenbaum / CNBC:
The White House confirms that President Trump will tour Apple's manufacturing plant in Austin on November 20 — - Apple announced its new Mac Pro will be assembled at the Austin factory after winning tariff exemptions from the Trump administration in September. — How Apple CEO Tim Cook won over Trump amid a trade war
Abrar Al-Heeti / CNET:
Sensor Tower: TikTok has passed 1.5B downloads worldwide on the App Store and Google Play, with 614M downloads in 2019 so far, up 6% YoY — The app has had 614 million downloads so far just this year, according to mobile intelligence firm Sensor Tower. — TikTok has passed 1.5 billion …
Emma Newburger / CNBC:
HP board unanimously rejects Xerox's ~$33B cash and stock offer to acquire the company — HP's board of directors said Sunday that they unanimously rejected a proposal from Xerox to acquire the company, because the offer is not in the best interest of shareholders and would undervalue HP.
I'm doing a bit of refinement now that I've had a chance to use tweetSucker for a few days. First impression, I tweet a lot, and most of it is uninteresting a day later. I realized what I want most are tweets that are't links, rt's or replies. Original stuff. An idea that could possibly turn into an interesting piece on the blog. So I adjusted the app so that it splits them up into the four categories. I've pasted below the four classes of tweets from yesterday. Here's the OPML file.
Original tweets
- In a way it’s great the Trump is so rampant and open about his corruption. Because if we ever get out of this mess we are going to create some super kick ass laws to prevent this shit from ever happening again.
- Are there any good impeachment podcasts?
- I am far from being a billionaire. But I've made good money selling software, real estate and I just inherited a bit of money from my parents. This is what I have to say. I was always amazed at how little I paid in taxes on each of the major events.
- The whole point of impeachment it seems to me is to spin the Repubs around and around until they pass out. Then we hypnotize them.
- I'm working my way through Mr Robot, starting with season 1 so I can watch the final season without being horribly confused. But all of a sudden there's the final season of Man in the High Castle. Oy. And the third season of The Crown is coming soon.
- I love the story from the Roger Stone trial how Trump directed the release of Democrats emails.
Links
- Trump begins 'portions' of annual physical exam at Walter Reed. https://t.co/HW8pcKZycf
- I wish there was a .newbie extension. Unlike many other people, I like the idea of newbies. It means you're getting out and trying out new things. With that I bring you.. https://t.co/ON7vwAdBQO
- @Paul__Walsh https://t.co/7k43qvw3sY https://t.co/Um38JPJD2S
- Apple Is Trying to Kill Web Technology. https://t.co/h7TAmt7GtT
- @AdamParkhomenko @TedraCobb #streisandeffect. https://t.co/JFoGBAi02X
- A longish essay on how humans deal with change. https://t.co/ON7vwAdBQO
- See how much bigger the problem is than Trump. https://t.co/KJMqMalnTB
- White supremacy rules the Republican party. (Yes, it's pretty much out in the open.) https://t.co/POv5IOYSRt
- @beradleydavis https://t.co/lwh41Shbsu
- @beradleydavis https://t.co/1nr3XisecQ
- This Is How Trump's Gangster Government Works. https://t.co/J0muBV5vXV
- RT @davewiner: Kyrie Irving has helped Boston enormously, by leaving. https://t.co/MYbKOKN6Py
- There was a time when many wondered, myself included, whether Speaker Pelosi was up to exposing Trump. https://t.co/xzTT5Haov0
- RT @CNN: This 9-year-old boy is about to graduate from college https://t.co/yWDfk4i48u https://t.co/YRMPWKMpIu
- Kyrie Irving has helped Boston enormously, by leaving. https://t.co/MYbKOKN6Py
- UCLA receives $20 million to establish UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute. https://t.co/YVibMd5Rh2
Replies
- @kenolin1 @eilenez I bet he went to Harvard.
- @Paul__Walsh @migueldeicaza Just curious will some version of MacOS only run software downloaded from the app store?
- @Paul__Walsh Gotcha. Egos were always a problem with Apple. Remember who the founder was. (Woz on the other hand has an ego for sure but he's a sweetheart.)
- @koush @migueldeicaza Which is something millennials can legitimately hate boomers for. We didn't have to deal with app stores, or malware for that matter. The tech world was innocent when we were young. It was perfect. otoh machines had little memory and basically sucked. cc @danb @mkapor
- @Paul__Walsh Actually no -- the problem was a guy named Sidhu who was in charge of networking at Apple. He had a small number of devs he liked, and they got to make network software. So there were three email apps and mazewars, and that's about it for network software.
- @koush @migueldeicaza I don't care about app stores. Not for me. If they had been standard when I started, I would have probably never made anything of myself in software.
- @Paul__Walsh All the way back to 1987 when they shipped the Mac Plus with networking built in. Every Mac had it. Super easy to set up. Impossible APIs (probably by design). That was the door they left open for the web.
- @migueldeicaza I don't care about being in the app store. And the usual thing applies to links I post, I just thought it was worth looking at. No endorsement implied.
- @migueldeicaza I'm not dropping anything. I made my investment in electron and have been reaping the benefits. I'm so tired of junior techies deciding to rip up the pavement and make us all go on diaspora. Too old for that bullshit. I'm never updating my Mac. ;-)
- @gaberivera Something like what's going on re Ukraine right now. Total saturation in the news.
- @migueldeicaza I don't understand. And you and I don't see eye to eye on much in tech. Electron is great. I use it all the time. Saves my ass. Like everything it matters how you write your code.
- @dsearls @bjm262run And Doc, Google is doing it too, from a whole other angle. They want to turn the web into their own silo. We've been here before. What comes next is something like the web. ;-)
- @Paul__Walsh Apple hated the web right from the start. I was very close to Apple at the time, had friends there, and it hit me one day as an AHA. The web totally fucked their vision of computing -- wizzy. They could have had it all if they had made appletalk easier for devs to code for.
- @dsearls @Apple That app broke the web for me on my iPhone and iPad. I'm sure that was their intention? Whatever.
- @KenSmith My guess: Not enough.
- @ewarren Re #3 -- Until Citizens United there were limits on how much political speech billionaires could buy. Now our elections have become jokes. It was a huge mistake. Since it was a Supreme Court decision the only ways to fix it are to change the court or change the Constitution.
- @ewarren Re #1 -- making individual people targets is going to get someone killed. knowing that the billionaires are going to become even more distant from reality. And they have a lot of power, and the more disconnected they are, the worse for everyone.
- I would like to propose a treaty between @ewarren and the billionaires of America. 1. Warren stops making it personal for moral and pragmatic reasons. 2. Billionaires agree that there will be tax increases. 3. Billionaires agree to aggressively fight against Citizens United.
- @macloo I thought Season 3 was great. The best. I laughed so much. I know I'm weird. ;-)
- @beradleydavis I've written a lot about that.
- @guan I never got into that.
- @KenSmith I'm pretty sure most people dont see it that way now.
RTs
- RT @glennkirschner2: I can’t believe we’re here again. Trump’s pardons put our soldiers in harm’s way. Other countries will assume our sold…
- RT @politico: BREAKING: A top White House national security aide told impeachment investigators that EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland claimed…
- RT @AP: BREAKING: Louisiana’s John Bel Edwards stuns GOP, wins reelection to a second term as the Deep South’s only Democratic governor.
- RT @TwitterSafety: What’s synthetic and manipulated media? It’s media that’s been significantly altered or created in a way that changes th…
- RT @davewiner: @koush @migueldeicaza Which is something millennials can legitimately hate boomers for. We didn't have to deal with app stor…
- RT @SRuhle: WOMEN face sexism & discrimination every day & we keep pressing forward. What @EliseStefanik did in knowingly violating a rule…
- RT @joanwalsh: Where is Pompeo, anyway? What a coward.
- RT @briefbk: @Chanders @nytimes @washingtonpost Chris, this is @davewiner using a different account. From time to time friends of mine quot…
- RT @davewiner: This is about so much more than impeachment.
- RT @VickyPJWard: EXCLUSIVE: At last year's WH Hanukkah party, Lev Parnas & Igor Fruman had a private meeting w Trump & Giuliani during whic…
- RT @FaceTheNation: “He made a mistake,” @SpeakerPelosi says on Trump's tweet about Yovanovitch during her testimony. “I think part of it is…
Jim Salter / Ars Technica:
How the mesh Wi-Fi router startup Plume is winning partnerships with some of the biggest US and international ISPs, despite Eero's fire sale to Amazon — Simplified device management might be more attractive than Wi-Fi mesh itself. — Yesterday, Charter Communications* …
Mike Murphy / Quartz:
Profile of Mixhalo, a live-music app being offered by bands like Aerosmith as a VIP experience, to let fans hear the music at live shows as the band intended — Think back to the first time you saw a high-definition TV program. — After a lifetime of looking at standard-definition shows …
Mark Harris / MIT Technology Review:
New research shows that thousands of ships in Shanghai, the world's busiest port, are falling victim to spoofing of GPS systems that has left experts baffled — A sophisticated new electronic warfare system is being used at the world's busiest port. But is it sand thieves or the Chinese state behind it?
Derek Wallbank / Bloomberg:
Enlitic, which is working on an AI-aided medical diagnostic tool that can read radiology scans, announces $25M Series B-1, following a $15M Series B in April — Health technology startup Enlitic announced it had completed a $25 million round of Series B-1 financing, valuing …
NoCamels:
Israel-based Pcysys, which has developed a cybersecurity risk assessment service that uses automated penetration testing, closes $10M Series A — Israeli cybersecurity startup Pcysys, announced on Wednesday that it completed a $10 million Series A funding round led by Canadian VC firm Awz Ventures …
Katherine Davis / AmericanInno:
Chicago-based Apervita raises $22M for its cloud-based platform that enables insurers and healthcare providers to share clinical and insurance claims data — Chicago healthcare startup Apervita has raised new financing following its merger with Boston-based Qcentive over the summer.
Jordan Crook / TechCrunch:
Loop Returns, which helps stores on Shopify handle online returns, raises $10M Series A led by FirstMark Capital — Loop Returns, the startup that helps brands handle returns from online purchases, has today announced the close of a $10 million Series A funding round led by FirstMark Capital.
Everywhere I've lived people greet outsiders mostly generously but there are always some who don't.
I've moved so much geographically and in what I do, over my 64 years, I have a lot of experience with it.
Silicon Valley welcomed me in 1979. The people who lived there before the various booms were farmers. Lots or orchards. Small towns, it looked like the Central Valley in Calif today. My family drove through there when I was ten years old and I remember it. In the first 20 years I was there, I felt like I had come home. Everyone was into the same things I was, personal computers, software designed for humans, and it was all so new, so much potential, so much to explore. But it already looked like Long Island. And traffic like you wouldn't believe got worse every year. Was it ruined by newcomers? Hard to say. Maybe it achieved its destiny. I left in 2003 because I more or less hated what it had become.
While I was there, I got involved peripherally with Napster when it was booming. I was fascinated. My blog was well-read in tech, so I got to know a lot of music people in that period, not always in a friendly way. Ultimately I think they would have done better if they listened and accepted that change was inevitable, and they could profit from it. People were actively interested in music in ways I had never seen. But the insiders desperately didn't want it to change. Is it better that now we can all program our own music? I feel very strongly -- yes. It's hard to imagine that when I grew up I was limited to what was played on the radio and what I could afford to buy. There was so much more music. And music is so personal. All that potential opened up as Napster broke the dam. It was incredible for the users. The people who make and sell music didn't appreciate that or respect that.
My own family are immigrants. My parents and grandparents landed in Queens and Brooklyn as refugees during WWII, running for their lives from the Nazis. We were not universally welcomed. Lots of antisemitism. I grew up ashamed of my heritage, because I took on the attitudes people had about us.
A funny thing happened, as my mother was getting old. The neighborhood she had lived in since the 1960s was turning from Irish, Italian with a little Jewish, to Asian -- Chinese and Korean. And my mom, born in Prague, an American newbie, was angry about the changes that were coming. I was amazed to see this, because she was a very inclusive sort of person, welcoming, and sought out different experiences. And of course she had herself benefited from a country that had its doors open to anyone. When she died, and it came time to sell the house, the neighbors next door begged us not to sell to an Asian family. They were also refugees. I said nothing but I thought it was both futile and hypocritical.
I guess if I lived anywhere for long enough to resent newbies it would be on the net. I started using it as a grad student in the 70s. I've been through every iteration, and yes -- there's a point at which the area you've learned to call home becomes overrun with newbies. They have no idea about the culture you've developed, and they don't seem to care. They do the equivalent of leaving broken glass and dirty diapers at our pristine swimming holes. It sucks.
Facebook is, to me, the Land of the Newbies, the way AOL was 30 years ago. But I love FB the community (I do not love FB the company, though I know a number of people who work there, some of whom I consider lifetime friends). I especially love the Woodstock group, because it's filled with love, and I've benefited so much from it. I'm not kidding. 99.99 percent of my interactions there over the last year or so have been lovely. And I've learned so much about the place I now call home, far more than I could have without the group. It's changed the way I think about local news. Friends who work in journalism don't understand the role FB groups play, and they're not listening any better than the music industry people did in Napster days.
I have friends who remember the net before FB as I do who will not use FB. They say they got along fine without it before, and will be fine now. No doubt. But they're missing something huge and cultural, and eventually the software they make will be irrelevant because they failed to move where the culture was going.
Humans dealing with change. A constant. We don't always do it well. God bless our pointy heads.
PS: I cross-posted this on FB because it's so much about FB.