Tech Brew Ride Home

ICOs now officially securities, some steps backward in the self-driving car space, parsing the Zuckerberg New Yorker profile, and did Facebook disrespect the memory of Burt Reynolds?  Stories from: @eosnos Tweets: @ezraklein, @BrendanNyhan Links:US Judge Rules ICO Frauds Fall Under Securities Law (CoinDesk)Renesas in $6.7 billion deal for IDT to boost chips for self-driving cars (Reuters)GM's Plan to Test Autonomous Cars in New York City Seems to Have Gone up in Smoke (Jalopnik)How to prepare your iPhone for a trade-in program (The Verge)Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy? (The New Yorker)Facebook Apologizes For Taking Down Your Horny Burt Reynolds Posts (Vulture)

Some juicy new Apple rumors for Wednesday, the end of the Jack Ma era is nigh upon us, there were some naughty apps in the Mac App Store and why following people whose politics you disagree with might not lead to peace in our time. Links:Kuo: USB-C on 2018 iPad Pro, Touch ID on 2018 MacBook, EKG and Ceramic Backs on All Apple Watch Series 4 Models, More (MacRumors)Snap just lost its chief strategy officer (Fast Company)Alibaba announces Jack Ma succession plan: CEO Daniel Zhang to take over as chairman in a year (CNBC)Additional Mac App Store apps caught stealing and uploading browser history (9to5Mac)No. 1 paid utility in Mac App Store steals browser history, sends it to Chinese server (9to5Mac)Twitter’s Flawed Solution to Political Polarization (NYTimes Opinion)Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy? (The New Yorker)

Tim Armstrong might be on his way out of Oath, Alex Jones is permanently off of Twitter, a Cambridge Analytica figure is officially no longer a Facebook employee, Elon Musk smokes a blunt and the weekend longreads suggestions! Links:Verizon’s Internet Boss Tim Armstrong in Talks to Leave (WSJ)Tim Armstrong is headed out of Verizon. What happens to the $9 billion content company he is leaving behind? (Recode)Charlie Warzel Twitter ThreadHOW THAT MAGICAL JACK DORSEY–ALEX JONES PHOTO HAPPENED (Wired)A Facebook scientist tied to Cambridge Analytica has quietly left Facebook (Fast Company)Weed, whiskey, Tesla and a flamethrower: Elon Musk meets Joe Rogan (CNN Tech)Tesla Erupts in Chaos After Senior Execs Leave, Musk Tokes Up (Bloomberg) The Betterment Weekend Longreads:Inside the World of Eddy Cue, Apple’s Services Chief (The Information)Bezos Unbound: Exclusive Interview With The Amazon Founder On What He Plans To Conquer Next (Forbes)The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan (Bloomberg)What went wrong at Social Capital (Axios)How Android Pie’s Adaptive Battery and Adaptive Brightness work (Venture Beat)The man who won the lottery 14 times (The Hustle)

The 2014 Sony hacker gets charged, Lyft beats Uber to the scooter punch, why Roblox is the biggest thing since Minecraft, Spotify plays chicken with the music industry, and let’s play another round of Apple event rumor bingo. Links:U.S. charges North Korean operative in conspiracy to hack Sony Pictures, banks (The Washington Post)Lyft rolls out its first electric scooters in Denver (The Verge)You Will Soon Be Able to Control Your Xbox With Alexa and Cortana (Thurrott)Walmart partners with delivery logistics platform Bringg on last-mile grocery delivery (TechCrunch)The new Roomba could be the end of vacuuming (Quartz)Kids' gaming platform Roblox raises $150M (TechCrunch)The video game turning teens into millionaires has raised a whopping $150 million, making it a $2.5 billion company (Business Insider)A New Spotify Initiative Makes the Big Record Labels Nervous (NYTimes)The Tension Is Building Between Spotify and the Music Industry (Bloomberg)‘iPhone Xs Max’ likely name for 6.5-inch OLED flagship, sources say (9to5Mac)

Tech CEOs hauled before Congress again, Theranos is no more, Google mulls big changes to URL’s and maybe the whole the-teens-are-abandoning-Facebook is a real thing after all? Links:Video of the Hearings (The US Senate)Facebook and Twitter testified before Congress. Conservative conspiracy theorists lurked behind them. (The Washington Post)Blood-Testing Firm Theranos to Dissolve (WSJ)HOW GOOGLE CHROME SPENT A DECADE MAKING THE WEB MORE SECURE (Wired)GOOGLE WANTS TO KILL THE URL (Wired)Americans are changing their relationship with Facebook (PEW Research)Instagram is building a standalone app for shopping (The Verge)Snap launches new styles of Spectacles that look more like traditional sunglasses (The Verge)Vimeo pivots business from media to tech (Axios)Vimeo launches stock video marketplace starting at $79 per clip (Venture Beat)

Amazon hits a trillion, the EU is giving Netflix quotas, gaming out various Apple rumors ahead of next week’s event and the robots are coming to the drive through window. LinksAmazon falls off $1 trillion market cap, leaving Apple the only public US company above the benchmark (Bloomberg)Local Product Quotas for Netflix, Amazon to Become Law, EU Official Says (EXCLUSIVE) (Variety)Ethereum in BigQuery: a Public Dataset for smart contract analytics (Google Cloud)Major cryptocurrency exchange delists Bitcoin Gold following $18M hack (TNW)2018 iPad Pro redesign is both brilliant and stupid (Cult of Mac)Samsung teases foldable smartphone launch for later this year (The Verge)China's Silicon Valley Threatens to Swallow Up Hong Kong (Bloomberg)Clinc is building a voice AI system to replace humans in drive-through restaurants (TechCrunch)

How those iPhone leaks happened (maybe), the scooter permits happened and some big names got snubbed, Google’s secret deal with MasterCard, and the weekend long reads suggestions.  Links:Exclusive: This is ‘iPhone XS’ — design, larger version, and gold colors confirmed (9to5Mac)Exclusive: Apple Watch Series 4 revealed — massive display, dense watch face, more (9to5Mac)Huawei’s AI Cube is a 4G router and Alexa speaker, not a cube (The Verge)Huawei's Google Home clone has Alexa inside (Engadget)Scooters will return to San Francisco, but Bird and Lime aren’t invited (The Verge)Mozilla announces Firefox will block trackers by default (Venture Beat)Google and Mastercard Cut a Secret Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales (Bloomberg) The Betterment Weekend Longreads:Franken-algorithms: the deadly consequences of unpredictable code (The Guardian)Logged off: meet the teens who refuse to use social media (The Guardian)How Big Tech Swallowed Seattle (Bloomberg Businessweek)The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages (The New Yorker)

An Apple acquisition suggests they’re serious about AR, Uber is serious about escooters, Google lets Kubernetes leave the nest, your IP address is not enough to finger you for a crime, and a fully functional Bugatti made out of Legos. Links:Apple buys startup focused on lenses for AR glasses (Reuters)Apple’s AR lenses purchase also sees future mobile storage (ComputerWorld)Google takes a step back from running the Kubernetes development infrastructure (TechCrunch)Uber Is Building Its Own Scooter to Compete in Frenzy (Bloomberg)Microsoft Requires Paid Parental Leave for Subcontractors (Bloomberg)Important Appeals Court Ruling States Clearly That Merely Having An IP Address Is Insufficient For Infringement Claims (TechDirt)FIRST EVER LIFE-SIZE AND DRIVABLE LEGO® TECHNIC BUGATTI CHIRON IS A PIONEERING PIECE OF ENGINEERING AND DESIGN (Lego)

A bunch of new laptops from Dell, Amazon might jump into the free tv game, Google updates Wear OS, and why the world’s oldest blockchain has been hiding in plain site since 1995. Links:Dell tempts Pixelbook lovers with premium $599 Inspiron Chromebook 14 (ArsTechnica)Dell shows its fall lineup of Alexa-ready Inspiron, XPS, and Vostro laptops and 2-in-1s (VentureBeat)Amazon Plans New Video App, Latest Step Into TV Ad Market (The Information)Google is revamping the Wear OS smartwatch user interface (TheVerge)The rise of giant consumer startups that said no to investor money (Recode)'World Computer' Project Dfinity Raises $102 Million (Fortune)The rise of crypto in higher education (Coinbase Reports)The Hot New Subject on Campus? It's Blockchain (Fortune)The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995 (Motherboard)

President Trump accuses Google of rigged search results, Instagram updates its identity systems, Yahoo scans your mail for marketing purposes, BuzzFeed tests memberships and the rarest Apple device in the world comes to auction. Links:You can now apply to be verified in Instagram (The Verge)Yahoo, Bucking Industry, Scans Emails for Data to Sell Advertisers (WSJ)Toyota Investing $500 Million in Uber in Driverless-Car Pact (WSJ)AutoX is using its self-driving vehicles to deliver groceries (TechCrunch)BuzzFeed News quietly tests a membership program (Digiday)Buzzfeed, With Nearly $500M In Funding, Asks For Contributions (Crunchbase News)How ‘Grand Theft Auto’ Is Changing the Way the World Experiences Music (Rolling Stone)First Apple Computer Goes Up For Auction, Expected to Fetch More Than $300,000 (Paleofuture)