10 things in tech you need to know today, August 30

Win
McNamee

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this
Thursday.

1.
US President Donald Trump continued to accuse Google of bias on
Wednesday, after he posted a video showing that the search firm
had promoted President Obama’s “State of the Union” address every
year, but failed to promote Trump’s. But BuzzFeed
found that Trump wasn’t telling the truth and that Google did in
fact promote his address in 2018.

2. Facebook has
launched its video-on-demand service, Watch,
globally. Watch allows users to access short
episodes of sports, drama, comedy, and other video through the
Facebook app.

3.
Apple has purchased Akonia Holographics, a company making lenses
for augmented reality goggles. Apple is said to
be working on a pair of smart goggles of its own, for launch in
2020.

4. SVMK,
the parent company of SurveyMonkey, filed Wednesday for an
initial public offering. The company is seeking
to raise as much as $100 million, but hasn’t yet said how many
shares it will sell.

5.
More than 160 Facebook employees are pushing back against what
they call the company’s “intolerant” liberal
culture. Posters promoting the group and
attacking the “outrage mob” have appeared around campus, and
debates among employees have broken out across Facebook Workplace
over the company’s approach to politics.

6.
Bernie Sanders has escalated his war with Amazon, saying he will
ask OSHA to investigate ‘unsafe working conditions’ in
warehouses. He said: “There are deeply disturbing
stories about working conditions at fulfillment centers run by
Amazon and its contractors.”

7.
The FBI is publicly disputing a report that China hacked Hillary
Clinton’s private email server after Trump tweeted about
it. A spokesman for the FBI told NBC News that
the bureau “has not found any evidence” Clinton’s server was
compromised by a hostile foreign actor.

8. Salesforce’s revenues
were up 27% in the second quarter, and the company has
big-spending executives to thank. CEO Marc Benioff
has conventionally been a critic of President Donald Trump, but
suggested during an earnings call that his tax cuts had
encouraged Salesforce’s customers to spend more.

9.
Snapchat has figured out how to use facial recognition to analyse
people’s selfies and score their emotions on a scale of 0 to
5. The company was granted a patent for a way to
detect exactly how a crowd of people is feeling.

10.
Donald Trump unblocked some Twitter users after a federal
court said preventing people from following him violated
individuals’ constitutional rights. The president
had blocked more than 41 accounts on Twitter, and has not yet
unblocked them all.

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