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Showing posts from July, 2020

Trump told reporters he will use executive power to ban TikTok

President Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he will act as soon as Saturday to ban TikTok from the US, CNBC reported . The story is updating. from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3fkXlvv via IFTTT

The leading arguments for a Microsoft-TikTok tie-up

Here they are, ranked by how much weight we put behind them:   from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Pc5Z51 via IFTTT

Florida teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind celebrity Twitter hack

Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren announced today that he has filed 30 felony charges against a 17-year-old resident of Tampa, Florida, who was described by the state attorney’s office as “the mastermind of the recent hack of Twitter .” The hack in question occurred earlier this month and involved high-profile Twitter users like Apple, Elon Musk, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, whose accounts all posted messages promoting a Bitcoin wallet and claiming, “All Bitcoin sent to the address below will be sent back doubled!” The teen (we’re not identifying them because they’re a minor) allegedly made more than $100,000 through this cryptocurrency scam. The state attorney’s office said that the teen was arrested earlier today, as a result of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice, and that they will be tried as an adult. They face charges including one count of organized fraud (over $50,000) and 17 counts of communications fraud (ove...

First U.S. apps based on Google and Apple Exposure Notification System expected in “coming weeks”

Google Vice President of Engineering Dave Burke provided an update about the Exposure Notifications System (ENS) that Google developed in partnership with Apple, as a way to help public health authorities supplement contact tracing efforts with a connected solution that preserves privacy while alerting people of potential exposure to confirmed cases of COVID-19. In the update, Burke notes that the company expects “to see the first et of these apps roll out in the coming weeks” in the U.S., which may be a tacit response to some critics who have pointed out that we haven’t seen much in the way of actual products being built on the technology that was launched in May. Burke writes that 20 states and territories across the U.S. are currently “exploring” apps that make use of the ENS system, and that together those represent nearly half (45%) of the overall American populace. He also shared recent updates and improvements made to both the Exposure Notification API, as well as to its su...

Delightree raises $3M to help franchise business owners simplify their operations

Owning one brick-and-mortar business seems complicated enough. But running multiple locations? For many owners, that’s a constant juggling act of phone calls, check lists, and driving back and forth from store to store. In the middle of a pandemic, it gets all the more complex. Delightree , a company out of the previous Alchemist Accelerator class , has raised $3M to build a tool hyper focused on helping owners of franchise businesses (think hotels, gyms, restaurant chains, etc) take their operations and workflows digital. A big part of the idea with Delightree is to move much of what currently happens through pen-and-paper checklists over to smartphones, allowing franchise owners to know what’s going at their locations from afar. They digitize workflows like the daily store opening/closing procedures or maintenance routines, with employees checking boxes on their devices rather than a paper todo list. If something gets missed along the way, Delightree can automatically ping the own...

Report: Trump wants to order TikTok owner ByteDance to sell US business

President Trump has plans to order China’s ByteDance, the owner of hit social video app TikTok, to divest from the company, according to new reporting from Bloomberg . The app is increasingly a target of U.S. security concerns over its Chinese ownership. While little is known about what that could mean — or if it’s how a sale of TikTok would really take place — the event would send huge waves through the tech world. TikTok is one of the only meaningful outside competitors for U.S.-based social networks like YouTube and Facebook. It would certainly be strange timing were an American tech giant to purchase TikTok: On Wednesday, a Congressional committee held a high-profile hearing scrutinizing tech’s biggest mergers and acquisitions. The White House declined to comment on the report when contacted by TechCrunch. TikTok has come under increased government scrutiny recently, with the president expressing interest in banning the app outright in the U.S. This month, Joe Biden’s campai...

Secret documents from US antitrust probe reveal big tech’s plot to control or crush the competition

Nearly 500 pages of evidence were made public during the House Judiciary’s marathon hearing this week on potential anti-competitive actions by Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple . We’ve collected them here with added context and an omnibus, searchable version for anyone who’d rather not juggle four dozen documents. The emails, chat logs and other communications listed here trickled out online as the hearings went on. Many are internal documents that were never meant to be exposed publicly — for instance, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling a colleague that “we can likely always just buy any competitive startups” shortly before acquiring Instagram in 2012. Congressional investigators wield considerable power in compelling the release of such documents, even against the will of the companies, which would almost certainly never provide such self-incriminating information to journalists. As such, these documents contain all manner of useful information, most of it providing insight ...