If you’ve been wondering what’s happening with technology these days, you need to look no further than today’s post:
- A former Google employee has alleged that Google’s top lawyer had a child with her while he was married and then cut her off. In addition, she describes the culture at Google as toxic that protects elite men. Jennifer Blakely is the former Google employee, published details about her relationship with Alphabet chief counsel David Drummond.
- Apple has apologized and announced changes to its AI assistant Siri after a report revealed that human workers regularly hear private voice conversations. Apple is now making a few changes to how it grades Siri’s accuracy, which includes not recording Siri conversations by default. This is in addition to some other new policies that Apple has recently announced.
- Google executives told Reuters that despite Huawei’s 90-day license from the Department of Commerce, it can’t license Android OS for its upcoming phones. Huawei’s flagship Mate 30 is on the way, and an executive said that it cannot be sold with Google apps and services. Does this mean Huawei will be bringing the world their own operating system?
- Oculus co-founder Michael Antonov has been accused of putting his hand under a woman’s skirt during a private Virtual Reality demonstration following an event at the 2016 Game Developers Conference. Antonov was Oculus’s chief software architect, but he left the company earlier this year. I wonder if there is a connection to this event?
- The Grace Hopper Celebration, which is the world’s largest conference for women in technology, has dropped Palantir as a sponsor over its work with ICE. Prior to the announcement, a Change.org petition was published demanding that Palantir be dropped as a sponsor. And their efforts seemed to have worked.
- The CEO of OnePlus has shared the first glimpse of the OnePlusTV, one of the most mysterious gadgets of 2019. The images shared by Pete Lau show him packaging the OnePlus TV off the production line as well as a OnePlus TV seemingly going through a screen calibration test. The OnePlus TV will have a premium price tag and will come with 4K resolution on a QLED screen and will run on an optimized and customized version of Google’s Android TV platform.
- WeWork replaced 43 million of CEO Adam Newmann’s stock options with special “profit interests”. This is unsettling, according to a compensation expert. The company has warned investors that if they don’t like the way that Neumann is paying himself or running the company, there is little that they can do about it.
- Microsoft’s massive online gaming service, Xbox Live, went down for millions of people this week. Microsoft warned of issues with core functionality including signing in, creating, managing or recovering an account and even the search function. That’s not very helpful for anyone trying to use Xbox Live this week.
- Facebook is adding new verification requirements for ads on its platform related to social issues, elections and politics in advance of the 2020 US election. Starting in mid-September, organizations will have to prove they are registered with the US government to run political ads, and a disclaimer on the ad will list them as a “Confirmed Organization”.