Tech Releases

Tehran court orders Iranian telecoms to block Telegram saying the app gave Islamic State "safe ground" and also citing the app's role in recent protests (Wall Street Journal)

CNN investigation finds that 103 Uber and 18 Lyft drivers have been accused of sexual assault or abuse over the past four years (CNNMoney)

Facebook is investigating a report that one of its security engineers may have used privileged access to stalk women online (Joseph Cox/Motherboard)

US jury convicts former Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain of wire fraud and other crimes related to claims he had inflated the firm's value before its sale to HP (Dan Levine/Reuters)

TCL’s follow-up to last year’s popular Roku 4K TVs starts at $649, ships tomorrow

Sources: Japan's Financial Services Agency is pressuring cryptocurrency exchanges to stop listing coins favored by criminals, including Monero, Zcash, and Dash (Jake Adelstein/Forbes)

Sources: Jan Koum, co-founder and CEO of WhatsApp, plans to exit Facebook after clashes relating to attempts to weaken the service's encryption and use its data (Elizabeth Dwoskin/Washington Post)

Danish citizen Salah Salem Saleh Sulaiman first to be convicted under Malaysia's fake news law after posting a YouTube video; Sulaiman to spend a month in jail (Reuters)

T-Mobile buying Sprint can be explained by its difficulty in competing with bids from AT&T and Verizon for Straight Path and other future spectrum auctions (Alex Sherman/CNBC)

SCOTUS to hear Google privacy settlement dispute, potentially ending class action settlements that pay charities and other 3rd-parties instead of those affected (Andrew Chung/Reuters)

Chinese govt-backed surveillance projects deploy headgear units across industries that detect swings in emotional states of employees by monitoring brainwaves (Stephen Chen/South China Morning Post)

PUBG maker Bluehole says Chinese police arrested 15 people and fined them a total of $5.1M for making and selling cheating programs, some containing trojans (Shabana Arif/IGN)

Ex-SoFi CEO Mike Cagney, who resigned after harassment allegations, raises $50M for Figure, which plans to use blockchain to quickly approve home-equity loans (Selina Wang/Bloomberg)

Fitbit to use Google's new Cloud Healthcare API to make its data available to doctors, allowing them to regularly monitor devices (Brian Heater/TechCrunch)

More Human Than Human review: Light on killer robots, killer on AI inspection

Charlie Kindel, a Microsoft veteran who joined Amazon five years ago and founded the Alexa Smart Home division, is leaving the company to take a break and relax (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

Google and NBC to make 10+ multi-episode VR productions to run alongside NBC's core programming; users can watch on YouTube or in VR on Cardboard, Daydream View (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Samsung announces 128GB/256GB models for Galaxy S9/S9+ to be available from Samsung.com in US, preorders starting May 1, after the flagships launched with 64GB (Joe Maring/Android Central)

Andra Capital raises $500M for Ethereum-based token called Silicon Valley Coin that investors can use to back a group of late-stage VC firms; summer ICO planned (Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss/Reuters)

Oculus is developing a new kind of VR theater experience where live actors in motion capture suits can perform around users, tentatively slated for next year (Joan E. Solsman/CNET)

F8 will be a more "muted" event this year, with developers blindsided by API changes and sources saying much of the event has been reworked after data scandal (Casey Newton/The Verge)

Well-regarded analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has reportedly resigned from KGI Securities and will focus more on companies other than Apple moving forward (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)

Marketing analytics firms Radius and Leadspace merge, now operating under the Radius brand with Leadspace's Doug Bewsher as CEO (Becky Peterson/Business Insider)

Mozilla to launch sponsored story recommendations from Pocket for new tabs with Firefox 60 in US (Paul Sawers/VentureBeat)

Starship Technologies launches autonomous robot delivery services aimed at corporate and academic campuses in Europe and US with ~1K robots rolling out in 2018 (Paul Sawers/VentureBeat)

Marketing analytics firms Radius and Leadspace merge to form a new entity which will operate under the Radius brand with Leadspace's Doug Bewsher as CEO (Radius/PR Newswire)

Didi announces an industry alliance for electric and autonomous vehicles with 31 firms, including Renault and Toyota; sources: a dedicated Didi fleet is planned (Reuters)

Facebook reduces the labor of networking by helping users create better substitutes for many in-person communication networks, which makes it very hard to quit (Sarah Jeong/The Verge)