10 things in tech you need to know today, August 31

Warren Buffett.Alex Wong / Getty Images

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

1. The 9to5Mac blog published photos purportedly showing some of this year’s iPhones, called the iPhone XS. The blog claims it has got hold of a marketing image for two phones.

2. Apple has officially sent out the press invitations to its iPhone event on September 12. The firm is expected to reveal three new iPhone models to follow up on last year’s iPhone X and iPhone 8.

3. Google dismantled a recent attack from Donald Trump, in which he claimed the company had not shown his State of the Union address The firm said it had in fact promoted his 2018 speech.

4. A board member has resigned from MoviePass’ parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics. In his resignation letter, Carl Schramm raised concerns about the corporate governance of Helios and accused management of withholding material information from the board for months.

5. Snapchat and other popular apps with maps were vandalized to label New York City as ‘Jewtropolis.’ The cause was vandalism of the mapping software from Mapbox, a third-party company that supplies mapping information to Snapchat, StreetEasy, and Citi Bike.

6. San Francisco has selected two companies — Scoot and Skip — to launch its dockless scooter-sharing pilot program. The decision locks Uber and Lyft out of an important new market.

7. Former White House Strategist Steve Bannon told CNN that Elon Musk and other tech CEOs are “all man childs.” Bannon said Musk had an “emotional breakdown” in an interview with The New York Times, and “flat out lied” about securing funding to take Tesla private.

8. Warren Buffett has said it would be a bad idea for Apple to buy Tesla. He said that building a long-term competitive advantage in the auto industry is much more difficult than in the tech industry, where companies can use speed, scale, and network effects to maintain an edge over competitors.

9. Loon, an Alphabet company that started as a Google project, is in preliminary talks with Uganda about providing 4G LTE internet service to the country’s rural areas. The talks indicate that there might be a market in Africa for Loon’s brand of balloon-borne WiFi service.

10. The SEC charged a former cloud security executive at Qualys with insider trading on Thursday. Amer Deeba, chief commercial officer at Qualys, allegedly gave his two brothers advance warning of poor financial results in Q1 2015 and encouraged them to sell all of their shares in the company.

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