10 things in tech you need to know today
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Wednesday.
1. Facebook says Iran-backed accounts pretended to be news organizations to spread misinformation and to launch cyber attacks. Facebook says it removed 652 Pages and accounts on its services that it linked to Iran, as well as numerous Russia-linked accounts involved in inauthentic behavior.
2. Y Combinator, a startup program that's harder to get into than Harvard, accepted all 15,000 applicants into Startup School after a major screwup. After initially informing some startups that they had been mistakenly accepted, it then did a U-turn and said all applicants had been accepted to its online course for entrepreneurs.
3. Tim Cook donated nearly $5 million worth of Apple shares to charity. Cook has donated 23,215 Apple shares to an unspecified charity, according to an SEC filing on Tuesday.
4. Rapper Azealia Banks is demanding Elon Musk return her phone in an ongoing saga between the pair. Banks suggested in a now-deleted Instagram post that Musk's attorney had seized her phone.
5. Amazon removed one of the best features from Amazon Prime, and Twitch users are furious. Amazon's incredibly popular Prime service is losing a major benefit: ad-free Twitch viewing.
6. Slack raised a whopping $427 million to become a $7.1 billion company. Slack, the popular work chat app, has raised $427 million in venture capital at a valuation of more than $7 billion, according to a news release.
7. It looks as if Elon Musk has deleted his Instagram account. The Tesla CEO's Instagram account has vanished amid accusations from the rapper Azealia Banks.
8. Facebook apologized to right-wing group PragerU after being accused of censoring its videos. Facebook said the removal of the videos was a mistake, but PragerU seemed unconvinced, claiming the removal was an act of deliberate censorship.
9. Uber appointed a new chief financial officer as it inches towards an IPO. Uber announced on Tuesday that it had appointed Nelson J. Chai, formerly of Merrill Lynch and CIT Group.
10. Israel won't renew a $27 million contract with Microsoft because it says switching to the cloud subscription model will double the price. The Israeli government announced on Tuesday that it will not renew its desktop software contract with Microsoft.
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