Wake Up and Smell These #TopTechStories 🍏

Libra’s Ranks Shrink Again As Crypto Group Appoints a Board

"Even by Facebook standards, it’s been a tumultuous few weeks for the company’s nascent cryptocurrency effort. First came the departure of PayPal, the old haunt of Facebook blockchain guru David Marcus, from the Libra Association, the group that plans to administer the cryptocurrency. Then came six other defections, including Visa and Mastercard—and, Monday morning, Priceline owner Bookings Holdings. Adding salt to the wound, Facebook’s new fintech subsidiary, Calibra, was slapped with a lawsuit last week over its logo, which bears a suspicious resemblance to another fintech’s look."

— Gregory Barber for Wired

Mozilla unveils 28 horror stories about YouTube’s recommendation algorithm

"Mozilla just launched a site featuring 28 user-submitted stories, detailing incidents where YouTube’s recommendation algorithm served bizarre and horrifying videos the users had shown no interest in. This included recommendations featuring racism, conspiracies, and violence. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm has faced a lot of scrutiny this year for radicalization, pedophilia, and for generally being “toxic” — which is problematic because 70 percent of the platform’s viewing time comes from recommendations. That’s why Mozilla launched the #YouTubeRegrets project, to highlight the issue and urge YouTube to change its practice."

— Már Másson Maack for TNW

Apple insists it's totally not doing that thing it wasn't accused of: We're not handing over Safari URLs to Tencent – just people's IP addresses

"Since February at least and perhaps longer, Safari's Safe Browsing framework has been receiving hash prefixes of known malware sites from Google Safe Browsing database, or for users in mainland China, Tencent's Safe Browsing database.

A 32-bit hash prefix like "ba7816bf" would represent the first eight characters of a 256-bit, 64-character SHA256 digest of a full URL.

Before it loads a requested website, Safari, like other browsers that implement a safe browsing lookup system, will hash the URL of the website to be visited and compare its hash prefix to the received hash segments of malicious sites.

In the event of a match – and there may be several given that hash prefixes aren't necessarily unique, Safari asks the API provider – Google or Tencent – for all the URLs that match the hash prefix.

Using that fetched list, Safari can then determine whether the intended destination matches anything on the list of malicious websites and present a warning if necessary. And it will do so unless the on-by-default "Fraudulent Website Warning" is disabled using the appropriate iOS or macOS settings menu."

— Thomas Claburn for The Register

[Hacking Tinder] Train an AI to Auto-Swipe for You 🖖

"Auto-tinder was created to train an AI using Tensorflow and Python3 that learns your interests in the other sex and automatically plays the tinder swiping-game for you."

— Joel Barmettler for Hacker Noon

Why Uber and Lyft Feature Competitors Who Could Cannibalize Them

"The ambition for Uber should be to reach a point in future that the user experience of getting to any destination is so superior on Uber that majority of mobility transaction in a city starts happening on its platform. That way Uber can leverage its huge sticky user-base, the demand side, to start charging on a per transaction to the supply side — public transportation. The long term advantage here out-weights short term loss."

— Ugam for Hacker Noon