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Hurricane Irma scraped past Puerto Rico and is headed toward Miami-Dade, Florida’s most populous county. Called one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, Irma devastated the islands of the Caribbean. Google Maps is marking road closures in real time ahead of the storm’s U.S. landfall, projected for Sunday morning. [The New York Times]
Hackers breached Equifax, accessing sensitive data from 143 million U.S. consumers. Equifax, one of the three major consumer credit-reporting agencies, acknowledged a data breach left credit card, Social Security and driver’s license numbers and other sensitive information vulnerable. Three senior Equifax executives, including the CFO, sold shares worth almost $1.8 million soon after the company discovered the breach on July 29. [Tony Romm / Recode]
Facebook has turned over all information about U.S. election ads it believes were bought by Russians operatives to former FBI director Robert Mueller, the special counsel in charge of investigating alleged Russian interference in last year’s presidential election. On Wednesday, Facebook said it had shut down several hundred accounts believed to be created by a Russian company linked to the Kremlin and used to buy $100,000 in ads pushing divisive issues during and after the election campaign.[Michelle Castillo / CNBC]
Amazon wants to build a second HQ in North America, and said it would start soliciting bids from cities for a complex that would house up to 50,000 employees. But the online retail giant’s pursuit of tax credits to build quickly got some pushback from Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley; Khanna cautioned that it would become a “race to the bottom” if cities tried to woo Amazon by offering overly favorable financial terms. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]
Two-thirds of American adults are getting their news from social media — 67 percent, exactly, more than ever before. Among the platforms, Facebook dominates, with 45 percent getting news on the social network; YouTube is next, with 18 percent; followed by Twitter, with 11 percent. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]
The familiar voice of Siri will sound noticeably different when iOS 11 hits millions of iPhones and iPads next week. After auditioning and sampling the voices of hundreds of people, Apple’s voice-controlled assistant now takes more pauses in sentence, knows more languages and generally sounds less robotic and more human. Chinese researchers recently found that they could command and potentially hack Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and other voice devices using a frequency too high for humans to hear.[David Pierce / Wired]
Top stories from Recode
There’s a new rival to the mostly male networking organizations that make deals happen in Silicon Valley.
Prominent voices are about to blast “self-perpetuating men’s clubs” as sexist social institutions.
Here’s how Alphabet’s self-driving cars learn to navigate a tricky intersection.
When the self-driving car comes across something it’s never seen, engineers recreate it in simulation.
U.S. college students can now buy a Spotify/Hulu bundle for $5 a month.
That would normally cost at least $13 a month. It may also be a new business model for Spotify.
Fixed broadband speeds are getting faster — what’s fastest in your city?
Comcast’s Xfinity is the fastest ISP nationwide, CenturyLink the slowest.
Which Android phone should I buy?
On the latest Too Embarrassed to Ask, The Verge’s Dieter Bohn talks with Kara Swisher and Lauren Goode about the new Android phones coming out this fall, including the recently released Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the company’s first Note-branded device since last year’s exploding-phone debacle.
This is cool
How many times has your personal information been exposed to hackers?
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
