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A former Googler published a shocking blog post.
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday.
- A former Googler has explosively alleged that Google's top lawyer had a child with her while he was married and then cut her off, and described a toxic culture that protects "elite men." Jennifer Blakely, a former Google employee, published details about her relationship with Alphabet chief counsel David Drummond on Wednesday.
- Amazon kept a "burn book" of all the mean things politicians said about the company during the fight over its second headquarters with New York City. The Wall Street Journal reportedly saw the "burn book," which is kept in a Microsoft Word document file and listed out insults from politicians and critics.
- Apple has apologized and announced changes to its AI assistant Siri after a report revealed that human workers regularly hear private voice conversations. The company is making a few changes to how it grades Siri's accuracy, which entails not recording Siri conversations by default, among other new policies.
- 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 it cannot be sold with Google apps and services.
- Oculus cofounder Michael Antonov has been accused of reaching beneath a woman's skirt during a private VR demo following an event at the 2016 Game Developers Conference. Antonov was Oculus's chief software architect but he left the Facebook-owned company earlier this year.
- The Grace Hopper Celebration, the world's largest conference for women in tech, has dropped Palantir as a sponsor over its work with ICE. Prior to the announcement on Wednesday, a Change.org petition was published demanding Palantir be dropped as a sponsor.
- The CEO of OnePlus has shared the first glimpse of the OnePlus TV, one of the most mysterious gadgets of 2019. The images shared by Pete Lau show him packaging the first OnePlus TV off the production line, as well as a OnePlus TV seemingly going through a screen calibration test.
- WeWork replaced 43 million of CEO Adam Neumann's stock options with special "profits interests," and a compensation expert called it "unsettling." The company flat out warns investors that if they don't like the way Neumann is paying himself or running the company, there will be little they can do about it.
- Microsoft's massive online gaming service, Xbox Live, went down for millions of people on Wednesday afternoon. Microsoft warned of issues with core functionality, including "signing in; creating, managing, or recovering an account; and search."
- Facebook is adding new verification requirements for ads on its platform about social issues, elections, and politics ahead 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."
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