Technology
- A game made with a real world dataset of defendants shows the shortcomings of COMPAS, an AI-powered risk assessment tool used in the US criminal legal system (MIT Technology Review)
- A behind-the-scenes account of a cyberattack that disrupted the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics, which was tied to a specific unit of Russia's GRU (Andy Greenberg/Wired)
- Inside Intuit's 20-year fight to make it harder to file taxes for free, including a pact with the IRS that kept a US-run service from competing with TurboTax (ProPublica)
- A nonprofit is fighting illegal logging via a treetop monitoring unit that uses AI to detect sounds of chainsaws recorded and uploaded by used cellphones (Mike Ives/New York Times)
- Seven US lawmakers, including Wyden, Cruz, Ocasio-Cortez, and Rubio accuse Apple of "censorship of apps" at the "behest of the Chinese government", in a letter (Bloomberg)
- Wing starts first commercial drone delivery service in the US, delivering orders from FedEx Express, Walgreens, and Sugar Magnolia in Christiansburg, Virginia (Wing Blog)
- Facebook reaches licensing deal with News Corp to feature headlines from WSJ, NY Post, and others in a coming news tab; sources: WaPo, BuzzFeed News, BI also in (Lukas I. Alpert/Wall Street Journal)
- MediaLab, a holding company that owns the Whisper app, buys Kik messenger from Kik Interactive, which now focuses on development of Kin cryptocurrency (Nikhilesh De/CoinDesk)
- Massive protests erupt in Lebanon after a now-withdrawn government proposal to levy ~$6/mo tax on calls via WhatsApp and similar apps, amid an economic crisis (An-Nahar)
- Cybersecurity startup Corelight, which is building a network traffic analysis platform for enterprises, raises $50M Series C, bringing its total raised to $84M (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)
- Data analytics startup Sisu emerges from stealth with $52.5M Series B led by NEA, with a16z and Green Bay participating, bringing its total raised to $66.7M (Jillian D'Onfro/Forbes)
- After buying Poloniex in 2018 for $400M, Circle spins it out into Polo Digital Assets, backed by an unnamed Asian firm, says it won't serve US customers anymore (Nikhilesh De/CoinDesk)
- The second beta of macOS Catalina 10.15.1 contains icons possibly depicting the widely rumored 16-inch MacBook Pro with slightly thinner bezels (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)
- Mark Hurd, co-CEO of Oracle and former CEO of HP, dies at 62; Hurd took a health-related leave of absence from Oracle in September (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
- Sex workers say Instagram keeps taking down accounts, giving confusing guidelines and explanations; Facebook blames moderators' interpretation of guidelines (Otillia Steadman/BuzzFeed News)
- Verizon and T-Mobile say Pixel 4 won't support RCS messaging on their networks at launch (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)
- Paris-based mobile game maker Madbox, which says it has generated 100M game downloads, raises €15M Series A from Alven Capital (Romain Dillet/TechCrunch)
- G7 report says Facebook's Libra poses competition and antitrust challenges and should not be launched until all legal and regulatory risks are addressed (Hannah Murphy/Financial Times)
- Quibi partners with T-Mobile, which will make the platform part of its offering, giving Quibi a broad distribution platform ahead of its April launch (Wendy Lee/Los Angeles Times)
- Facebook says it is working on ways to prevent child exploitation on its platforms once it introduces end-to-end encryption across its messaging apps (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)
- Samsung says fingerprint bug on Galaxy devices is due to the sensor reading 3D patterns in screen protectors as fingerprints, will patch it as soon as next week (Jon Porter/The Verge)
- Adobe says Photoshop for iPad will be released by year end, confirms that it will lack features after beta testers complained it was missing key elements (Bloomberg)
- Despite helping millions of people try VR, phone-based VR is all but dead, with Google shutting down Daydream and Samsung's Gear VR efforts failing to take off (Adi Robertson/The Verge)
- Nest is becoming less popular among residential builders as Google's software changes impede Nest devices' ability to connect with third-party IoT devices (Gerrit De Vynck/Bloomberg)
- Researcher finds bug dating back to 2013 in a driver for Realtek Wi-Fi chips in Linux devices that could let hackers remotely crash or compromise devices (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)
- YubiKeys can now be used to log into PCs running Windows 7, 8.1, and 10, via the Yubico Login app, previously only available to Mac and Linux users (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
- Zappos settles 2012 data breach lawsuit, compensating about 24M affected customers with a 10%-off coupon, a paltry deal compared to Equifax's settlement in July (Josephine Wolff/Slate)
- Atlassian acquires Code Barrel, makers of Automation for Jira, a tool used to automate routine processes with Jira that is used by Visa, Cisco, Airbnb, more (Natalie Gagliordi/ZDNet)
- iPhone users who save photos as HEIC/HEIF may get free unlimited storage of photos at original resolution with Google Photos, unlike Pixel 4 owners (Michael Potuck/9to5Mac)
- Nintendo reports that all variants of Switch have sold 15M+ units in North America since Q1 2017, and sales through September were up 20%+ YoY (Yahoo Finance)