Google's voice-assisted search app is considered by many to be the best one out there, and soon it will have its own device to live in. The company plans to launch its own Amazon Echo competitor later this year. The internal project code name: Chirp.
[Mark Bergen | Recode]
How did Facebook screw up its free mobile Internet program in India? In just about every way imaginable, says a very good Guardian feature. Mark Zuckerberg and executives clashed with entrepreneurs, telecoms, government officials and everyday people; a Facebook ad campaign only made things worse. Zuck has already started turning his attention further east.
[Rahul Bhatia | The Guardian]
Arianna Huffington isn't Travis Kalanick's only media mogul soulmate. News Corp./21st Century Fox owner Rupert Murdoch has a small chunk of Uber that could be worth hundreds of million dollars.
[Johana Bhuiyan and Edmund Lee | Recode]
On the latest Recode Media podcast, late night TV show host Samantha Bee talks to Peter Kafka about diversity, her old gig on Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" and how she puts her show online.
[Eric Johnson | Recode]
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has been in Silicon Valley a lot this year (including on Kara Swisher's podcast) to persuade tech companies to work with the military. The Pentagon is especially obsessed with artificial intelligence, and an officials are literally invoking "Iron Man" to describe what they imagine the future of the U.S. military looks like.
[John Markoff | The New York Times]
Voices
By Tony Haile
What publishers can and can't do — and how that forces them into giving up more of their core competencies to Facebook.
Media
By Peter Kafka
'Not true.'
Facebook
By Dawn Chmielewski
Allegations that news curators routinely suppress news of interest to conservatives riled the GOP.
Media
By Peter Kafka
Information doesn't want to be that free.
Transportation
By Johana Bhuiyan
This makes hacking cars particularly enticing for people looking to short a carmaker's stock.
Mobile
By Ina Fried
It'll disappear from app stores soon and stop working altogether at the end of August.
Michael Ratner, in the words of a friend, "sued some of the most powerful people in the world on behalf of some of the least powerful." He helped bring down stop-and-frisk in New York City, and he successfully persuaded the Supreme Court that Guantanamo prisoners had legal rights. His New York Times obituary is pretty inspiring. Ratner died of complications of cancer, at 72.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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