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Recode Daily: Bye-bye, Bannon

Plus, the data Snapchat didn’t want you too see, Amazon keeps it low-key at CES, and pole-dancing robots for art.

Steve Bannon stands on a stage in front of an American flag banner
Former Breitbart executive chairman (and former White House chief strategist) Steve Bannon
Joe Raedle / Getty

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is out as executive chairman of Breitbart News Network. Bannon’s departure comes after remarks were attributed to him in the new book “Fire and Fury,” in which Bannon questioned the president’s mental fitness and disparaged Donald Trump Jr. Bannon also lost his gig at SiriusXM; for good measure, Fox News said it has no intention of giving Bannon a job. [Jeremy W. Peters / The New York Times]

One of Donald Trump’s lawyers is suing BuzzFeed for publishing the explosive, unverified Trump dossier last year. Michael Cohen says the website defamed him when it published the document; BuzzFeed news editor Ben Smith responded with a NYT op-ed: “I’m Proud We Published the Trump-Russia Dossier.” [Jennifer Jacobs / Bloomberg]

Congress is bringing Alphabet, Facebook and Twitter back to Capitol Hill next week — this time to grill them about extremist and terrorist content on their sites. And Democrats have enough votes to force the Senate to debate the FCC’s recently repealed net neutrality rules, even though they don’t have the votes to restore the Obama-era rules. [Tony Romm / Recode]

Amazon didn’t have the kind of splashy presence at CES that Google went all-out for this year, but so many gadget makers were pledging to bake Alexa into their products that it became the dominant story of this year’s tech trade show. Amazon says it has about 50 different third-party Alexa devices on the market; here’s a rare look inside the lab where Alexa is plotting to take over the world. Meanwhile, Facebook will unveil its take on a video chat device like Amazon’s Echo show at its F8 conference in May; called Portal, it will cost $499 and ship in the second half of 2018. [Dan Frommer / Recode]

Kodak announced plans for a cryptocurrency called “Kodakcoin.” You know what happened next: Shares jumped as much as 77 percent. Kodak emerged from bankruptcy in 2013. Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said he regretted calling the digital currency bitcoin a fraud. “The blockchain is real,” he said. [Jeremy Herron / Bloomberg]

Here’s the data that Snapchat doesn’t want you to see: The secretive Snap company keeps its partners, investors and even employees in the dark about how core features are performing, but leaked internal metrics point to why the Snapchat app had to be reinvented. [Taylor Lorenz / Daily Beast]

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The video site’s future is up in the air again. Meanwhile, some numbers, with caveats.

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On the latest episode of Recode Decode, the author of “100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings” talks about her next one, “How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings.”

This is cool

What could be more Vegas — or more CES — than pole-dancing robots?


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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