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🗞 News
ARM has cut ties with Huawei, as part of the US bar on doing business with them. This isn't immediate: ARM will cease collaboration rather than block Huawei from using anything right away, but ARM technology is at the heart of chips inside every smartphone on earth and a lot of other equipment as well. This is potentially much more serious than the ban on Google Android apps on Huawei phones last week. Link
Facebook released a report giving statistics on its effort to remove harmful content. The headline numbers are eye-catching, with over 2bn fake accounts removed, but that really just tell you a lot of people are trying to get in - more interesting is to look at which kinds of content FB currently finds it easy versus hard to spot automatically. Link
Amazon made a substantial investment in Deliveroo, a big European food delivery company. Link
The government of the US city of Baltimore has been pretty much shut down in the last few weeks by a malware attack on city IT systems. It appears the attack uses tools stolen recently from the NSA (which is why making 'back-doors' in software security and giving the government the key is a really terrible idea). Link
A major American mortgage processing company put effectively all financial documents it's seen since 2003 online, with no security at all - someone spotted you could just add a sequential account number to a URL to get any of 885 million PDFs. This is staggering carelessness. Link
According to the FT ($), Facebook is working with a bunch of other organizations in the bitcoin world around its bitcoin-based payment project (to be called... Marks?), including the Winkelvii brothers who claimed Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them in the first place. Link
🔮 Reading
Long WSJ ($) piece on the history of ethics allegations around Huawei. Link
And a Bloomberg interview with the Huawei founder, Ren Zhengfei. Link
a16z's managing partner Scott Kupor is publishing a book next week detailing the ins and outs of venture capital. Link
Mike Moritz of Sequoia wrote a piece in the FT ($) on the hot new thing - 'dark kitchens' (restaurants where food is prepared for delivery only). Link
After all the recent profiles of Facebook execs trying to deal with harmful content, now one with the equivalent at Youtube. Again - harder than we would like. Link
Long a16z study on the shape of the podcast market. Link
Atomico online manual on how to build inclusion into a software company. Link
😮 Cool things of the week
Panic (indie Mac software gods) are making their own custom hand-held gaming console, 'Playdate'. Fun. Link
The inside story on why He-Man had a giant tiger. Truly hilarious, and also a great story about how products really get made. Link
From 1984, an article explaining these strange and exciting new 'spreadsheet' programs. Maybe they might give us a reason to buy a 'microcomputer'? Link
📊 Statistics
LUMA's state of Digital Media 2019. Link
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