Month: February 2020
Apple will reopen its five Beijing stores on February 14th, with limited hours
Apple is reportedly planning to reopen its five Beijing stores on February 14th, albeit with limited hours, via Reuters. The stores will be the first to reopen in China since Apple closed all of its retail stores on February 1st due to concerns about the coronavirus. The company’s five Beijing…
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Surprise! Audit finds automated license plate reader programs are a privacy nightmare
Automated license plate readers, ALPRs, would be controversial even if they were responsibly employed by the governments that run them. Unfortunately, and to no one’s surprise, the way they actually operate is “deeply disturbing and confirm[s] our worst fears about the misuse of this data,” according to an audit of…
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Portfolio bloat: what’s happening to thousands of startups going nowhere fast
Earlier this week, much was made of the e-commerce business Brandless deciding to shutter its doors. Industry observers found its fate particularly interesting, given that Brandless was only a few years old and had raised substantial funding, including $100 million from the SoftBank Vision Fund alone. Still, Brandless is far…
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Oracle strikes back at Google in Supreme Court copyright case
Oracle has filed its response in an upcoming Supreme Court copyright battle. The company accuses Google of stealing code from its Java language, claiming (as it has for many years) that Google “committed an egregious act of plagiarism” by building support for Java into Android without officially licensing the language.…
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Inside Clinc, the AI startup facing troubling allegations of sexual harassment
On June 5th, 2017, Ryan*, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, sent a desperate email to the head of the computer science department at the school. “Hello Professor, I have an urgent matter to discuss with you. When will you be back?” he wrote. He was concerned about…
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Google removes even more malicious Chrome extensions
Google has removed over 500 malicious Chrome extensions from its official Web Store following a two-month long investigation by independent security researcher Jamila Kaya and Cisco’s Duo Security team. The extensions, which have now been removed from the Web Store and deactivated in users’ browsers, injected malicious ads into users’…
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