Technology
- S. Korea's finance watchdog FSS: damages from voice phishing grew ~73% YoY to $159M, and it will partner with SK Telecom to develop AI to prevent such attacks (Cho Mu-Hyun/ZDNet)
- Sensor Tower: five out of ten top grossing Apple App Store apps in 2018 are from China, but Netflix holds the top spot with $790M in revenues as of November 30 (Paige Leskin/Business Insider)
- Test shows that Android phones like LG G7 ThinQ, OnePlus 6, and Samsung Galaxy S9 and Note 8 can be unlocked via facial recognition using 3D-printed head models (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)
- To increase profits in its retail business, Amazon is asking brands with cheap but heavy or bulky items to change packaging and ship from their own warehouses (Wall Street Journal)
- Leaked report prepared for Senate analyzes Russian disinformation that supported Trump across millions of posts on YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, more (Washington Post)
- With EU governments increasingly concerned about Huawei, telecoms including UK's BT, France's Orange, and Deutsche Telekom are reconsidering the use of its gear (Bloomberg)
- Study: crypto asset service providers have 139M total users and at least 35M identity-verified users whose growth nearly doubled in first three quarters of 2018 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
- A secured lender is selling off assets, including AR/VR patent portfolio, of Osterhout Design Group, the maker of R-9 and other smartglasses (Ian Hamilton/UploadVR)
- Tencent's Blade security team finds SQLite vulnerability that affects thousands of apps, including Google Home and Chromium open-source browser engine (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
- Colin Kroll, the CEO, co-founder of HQ Trivia and co-founder of Vine, has died at 34; police source says a drug overdose is suspected (TMZ.com)
- PlanetScale, a database-as-a-service startup based on tech that helped scale YouTube, exits stealth, has raised $3M seed from prominent tech executives in April (Josh Constine/TechCrunch)
- Latticework, which is working on a consumer focused $550 NAS device called Amber and a cloud backup platform, has raised a $13M seed round (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)
- A year after FCC's vote to repeal net neutrality rules, there have been no big changes in how ISPs and mobile carriers provide their services (Klint Finley/Wired)
- Hulu is launching a new private programmatic marketplace for advertisers to buy its on-demand and TV inventory; the marketplace won't replace upfront deals (Jeanine Poggi/Ad Age)
- Intel extends partnership with esports company ESL in $100M deal to provide tech, including high-powered CPUs and 5G, for esports events worldwide through 2021 (Annie Pei/CNBC)
- Synthace, the developer of Antha OS for automating laboratory processes for biological experiments, raises $25.6M Series B led by Horizons Ventures (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)