Technology news

Joichi Ito, the embattled director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, has stepped down according to a statement by MIT’s president, L. Rafael Reif. The news was first reported by The New York Times, which had received a copy of an email sent by Ito to university provost Martin A. Schmidt.“After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks,” the now-former director writes, “I think that it is best that I resign as director of the media lab and

Is capital moral or amoral?
In the predominant view held in Silicon Valley today, capital is amoral — cash is cash, and regardless of where it comes from, once it leaves the hand of its investor or donor, it no longer has that individual’s taint. That money might have previously been spent on acquiring access to underage girls, or murder, or espionage, but now it is being spent on something productive, something useful. Isn’t that ultimately a net win for society?
That culture

“Carnival Row” offers an unlikely mix of genres, laying out a murder mystery in a world of fairies and other mythical creatures, while also delivering a healthy dose of allegorical politics.
And as we explain in the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, the show (recently released on Amazon Prime Video) does take some getting used to. There’s a certain clumsiness in the way the opening episode insists on its grittiness and adult themes — and most viewers will pr

Wikipediawas forced offline in several countries Friday after a cyber attack hit the global encyclopedia.
Users across Europe and parts of the Middle East experienced outages shortly before 7pm, BST, according to downdetector.com.
Wikimedia’s German Twitter account posted: “The Wikimedia server…is currently being paralysed by a massive and very broad DDOS [distributed denial of service] attack.”
The site issued the following statement:
Today, Wikipedia was hit with a mal

Top VCs on the changing landscape for enterprise startups
TechCrunch had our debut confab for enterprise types this week at Yerba Buena Center in SF, where we heard from Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, Apple VP Susan Prescott of Apple, and Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich. We were sold out, which perhaps isn’t all that surprising given the amount of interest in enterprise these days. Expect more events to come.
Our Silicon Valley editor Connie Loizos hosted a panel with leading enterprise VCs

Back in June Uber went on a hiring spree in New York, hiring at least 100 fintech-oriented tech workers to ostensibly look at creating products to increase loyalty and engagement among users and drivers, including things like banking. Cue a flurry of speculation. It now looks like Uberis taking baby-steps towards building such a raft of products out, potentially by offering loans directly to drivers, according to a report from Recode/Vox.
The story is based on the emergence of an in-app survey w

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I noted Peloton’s secret weapons. Before that, I wrote about a new e-commerce startup, Pietra.Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to [email protected] or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, yo

Apple is planning to stream its iPhone 11 event on Google’s YouTube platform on Tuesday. It will mark the first time that Apple has ever streamed one of the company’s events on YouTube, and it will greatly expand the amount of people able to view the stream. Last year Apple extended its iPhone event stream to Twitter, and the company has been gradually increasing the availability of its stream in recent years.
Windows 10 users started to gain access to the stream back in 2015, thanks

PrimaryBid, a UK-regulated platform connecting publicly listed companies with everyday investors for discounted share issuances has previously raised $3M. It’s now upped those stakes with an $8.6M funding round, led by UK VCs Pentech and Outward VC with participation from new and existing investors. Craig Anderson, a partner at Pentech, will join the PrimaryBidBoard of Directors with Outward VC having a Board Observer seat.
This investment is representative of the trend towards unpacking c

150 full-time employees and interns at Microsoft have volunteered their mornings, weekends, and nights to create a Microsoft musical video. The video was shot in various buildings at Microsoft’s corporate campus in Redmond, Washington and it features interns and staff members singing and dancing about how it’s “all happening here.”
It starts off with a section about co-founder Bill Gates, before some classic lines like “all around the world our products are well kno

Image: Hisense Roku is bringing its TV operating system outside of North America for the first time, the company announced at IFA today. Hisense UK will release its first TVs powered by Roku in the fourth quarter of this year. Previously, Roku’s television operating system has only been available in North America where it’s been featured in TVs from TCL, Sharp, and Hisense’s US arm.
We’ve always liked Roku’s TV operating system, so it’s great to see it launch

RokuTV today represents more than 1 in 3 smart TVs sold in the U.S. Now, the company is bringing its TV licensing program to European markets. At the consumer tech show IFA in Berlin, Roku announced it will now allow manufacturers to license its TV reference designs and use its Roku OS to build smart TVs for sale in Europe. It also said Hisense would be its first European Roku TV partner.
Today, the connected TV market is no longer limited to just the dongles, sticks, and streaming media players

India’s attempt to become the first nation to soft land a robotic spacecraft at the moon’s South Pole, an unexplored region, has ended in failure, the space agency said Saturday.
Less than two miles above the lunar surface, the Vikram lander (named after Vikram Sarabhai, the father of India’s space program) lost communications with the mission control.
A live broadcast from ISRO, India’s equivalent of NASA, showed scientists grow tense as the control station struggled to

Dr. Shu Wang may have stumbled upon the cure for obesity. Dr. Wang, an associate professor at Texas Tech, believes that nanotechnology could prevent, or even reverse, obesity — a problem affecting one in three Americans. Obesity is characterized by an increase in adipose tissue, what most people would call fat. All mammals possess two types of adipose tissue. White tissue, or white fat, is where energy is stored. Brown tissue, or brown fat, aids in heat production by burning fat through e

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. Last week we showed you how to see what kinds of ads Instagram was likely to serve you, based on data it gathered about your browsing preferences. Now it’s time to show you how it’s adoptive parent, Facebook, thinks of you. There’s one important difference between the two: you can actually adjust Facebook’s ad preferences. To see

Image: Best Buy Best Buy has quietly announced that the mobile app platform for controlling its Insignia brand of smart home devices will be shutting down on November 6th. The company says affected products will still function at a basic level, but any features that rely on its Insignia Connect app and platform will no longer work. The products include its Insignia smart wall plugs, Wi-Fi light switches, its smart camera, and its Wi-Fi freezer (yes, a Wi-Fi freezer). Best Buy is now running a r

A new report from Apple contractors reveals that, allegedly, Apple deliberately set out to make Siri as neutral as possible with regards to recent events like MeToo — in spite of her being a focal point in the conversation about the gender politics in voice assistants. The Guardian reports Apple had an internal project to rewrite Siri’s responses to “sensitive topics,” which apparently included the recent MeToo movement among other things. According to leaked docume

Vape lung is spreading and the CDC is warning people not to use vaping products while they are investigating the cause. In a media briefing, the public health agency said that some 450 people are now thought to be affected, and as many as five have died.
The CDC’s incident manager for this issue, Dana Meaney Delman, summed up the situation as follows:
CDC, states, and other partners are actively investigating, but so far, no definitive cause has been established. No specific e-cigarette de