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The man who tried to set off a pipe bomb near Times Square yesterday is a Bangladeshi who moved to Brooklyn in 2011. The attack didn’t kill anyone but disrupted the city’s subways. Not a peep about the incident from the president of the United States, though his Department of Justice used the news to call for stricter immigration rules. [New York Times]
After bitcoin futures made their debut on Wall Street yesterday, Securities and Exchange Committee chairman Jay Clayton advised investors to “exercise extreme caution,” and said that his agency was warily watching the spike in interest in bitcoin, which has led the virtual currency to rise to more than $17,000. Clayton gave his tacit blessing to initial coin offerings, which have given entrepreneurs a new way to raise money outside of the typical venture capital system. The Winklevoss twins are the world’s first bitcoin billionaires. [Theodore Schleifer / Recode]
Verizon is re-upping its deal to stream NFL games for free to subscribers; sources say the wireless carrier will pay more than $1.5 billion for the rights. Traditional TV executives have started questioning the value of sports deals, but Verizon is making the move in large part to boost the AOL and Yahoo properties it has spent billions on in the past few years. [Peter Kafka / Recode]
Apple confirmed that it has bought the music-recognition app Shazam for the significantly discounted price of around $400 million — in an unusual-for-Apple move, the company publicly acknowledged the deal. Along with its ability to identify just about whatever song is currently playing, Shazam has a visual capability that lets you use your camera to ID objects — which may, in time, become a core utility on iPhone’s iOS. [Peter Kafka / Recode]
A group of early internet and computing pioneers have called on the Senate’s FCC oversight committee to censure and cancel the net neutrality vote, which is scheduled for Thursday. Calling FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s rush to dismantle net neutrality regulations “an imminent threat to the internet we worked so hard to create,” the 21 signatories include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web; and Vinton Cerf, who co-created the internet’s underlying TCP/IP protocol. [Adi Robertson / The Verge]
Former Gawker employees launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in a bid to purchase the blog out of bankruptcy and relaunch the website, which ceased publication in August 2016 after losing a lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan and funded by Peter Thiel. The consortium seeks to raise at least $500,000; if successful they say the relaunched site would be funded by readers and operated through a nonprofit foundation. [Jonathan Randles / The Wall Street Journal]
Top stories from Recode
Google is sending more traffic to publishers than Facebook — again.
Facebook sent 25 percent less traffic to publishes this year, while Google increased its traffic by 17 percent, according to Parse.ly.
The Visa innovation chief who was fired had a history of affairs with subordinates.
But it’s still unclear if those incidents played a part in his dismissal.
This is cool
An oral history of Viagra, which went generic yesterday after 19 years.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
