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- Oracle has reportedly entered the race to buy TikTok's US operations, competing with rival Microsoft for the viral app as Trump's deadline looms. The Financial Times reported Oracle has been working with US investors, including General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital, who own a stake in TikTok already.
- Epic Games has filed a temporary restraining order against Apple with the intention of getting "Fortnite" back on Apple's App Store. If granted by a judge, the restraining order would legally stop Apple from "removing, de-listing, refusing to list or otherwise making unavailable the app 'Fortnite,' including any update thereof."
- A British school student threatened to sue the UK government over an algorithm that was used to determine final grades after national exams were cancelled due to the pandemic. The algorithm has been widely criticized for hurting bright students at disadvantaged schools, costing them life-changing places at top colleges.
- Facebook 'actively promotes' Holocaust denial content to certain users, a new study has found. Facebook's search algorithm was found to "actively promote" Holocaust denial content to users who had previously interacted with similar content.
- Amazon is considering buying a minority stake in Rackspace in a deal that would strengthen the ties between the two firms, sources say. Rackspace helps companies migrate their data to Amazon Web Services, and the investment would strengthen the ties between the two companies.
- An open letter from Google warning that new Australian regulation would damage YouTube and Google Search in the country contains "misinformation," according to the country's competition watchdog. The draft regulation would force Facebook and Google to pay news publishers for their content.
- Europe's hot challenger banks Monzo, Starling Bank, and Revolut all posted ballooning losses for 2019, raising questions about their long-term viability. The additional challenge of COVID-19 may make the prospect of profitability even more remote, even after the trio have raised a collective $1.9 billion from investors.
- Quibi CEO Meg Whitman will speak at the Democratic National Convention Monday night, the DNC announced. Whitman previously ran for governor of California as a Republican and she is one of several current and former Republicans who oppose Trump billed to speak at the DNC.
- Russian billionaire and former Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov is quietly backing a virtual reality startup trying to rival Facebook with a multiplayer world. The former Brooklyn Nets owner said he expected "explosive growth" in the virtual reality market over the next decade.
- A college student made a fake blog post using an AI text generator and it was upvoted to the top of Hacker News by people who thought it was real. University of California, Berkeley student Liam Porr created several blog posts using OpenAI's GPT-3 text generator and several people subscribed to his account, believing he wrote the posts himself.
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