TLDR 2018-12-17

Facebook leaks private photos 🖼, 3D printed heads 😃, Vine co-founder dies

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Big Tech & Startups

T-Mobile, Sprint consider dropping Huawei, expect US security clearance for deal (1 minute read)

The US national security panel has been conducting a review of the T-Mobile and Sprint merger that was announced in April. It looks like the merger will be approved as early as next week, as both companies have agreed to consider curbing their use of Huawei equipment. US officials say Huawei is controlled by the Chinese state and might have back doors built into their networking equipment. Huawei says these claims are unfounded.

Facebook exposed up to 6.8 million users' private photos to developers in latest leak (2 minute read)

Facebook accidentally exposed the private photos of 6.8 million users to 1500 apps using their API between the dates of September 12th to September 25th. Users affected by the breach should get a notification telling them that their data has been breached. They are working with the developers to get these photos removed.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Switzerland to test 'hyperloop' train technologies (1 minute read)

A company called EuroTube is partnering with the the Swiss Federal Railways to create Europe's first hyperloop test site, which they will use to launch magnetic passenger pods at speeds up to 900 km/h. The site will be located in Collombey-Muraz, Switzerland, which was chosen because it offers "very flat terrain and with very few obstacles".

We Broke Into A Bunch Of Android Phones With A 3D-Printed Head (2 minute read)

Security researchers have managed to break into four Android phones (2 Samsungs, an LG and a OnePlus) using 3D printed heads made for about £300. They used about 50 cameras, then combined the images into a single 3D model. Then they put it into editing software to iron out any errors. They were unable to break past the iPhone's Face ID security or the Windows Hello facial recognition. There's a picture of the 3D printed head in the article, it looks surprisingly realistic.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

The Book of Secret Knowledge (Github Repo)

This is a collection of awesome lists, manuals, blogs, hacks, one-liners, cli/web tools and more for sys ops, dev ops, pentesters and security researchers. I'm a huge fan of this, it's essentially just a mind dump from a sys admin/security enthusiast.

PyText (Github Repo)

PyText is an open soruce natural language processing library built on top of PyTorch. It was created by Facebook Research, the goal is to make a library that can be used for rapid prototyping while also being flexible enough to extend and run at scale.
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Miscellaneous

HQ Trivia and Vine co-founder Colin Kroll found dead of suspected overdose (2 minute read)

Colin Kroll, the 35-year-old co-founder and CEO of the HQ Trivia app and co-founder of Vine, was found dead of a drug overdose. The HQ Trivia app broadcast a ceremony for him yesterday, and his co-founder Rus Yusupov will likely take over as CEO.

Following criticism, Robinhood backtracks on checking and savings feature (2 minute read)

So the Robinhood checking and savings account that was in Friday's TLDR that offered 3% interest turned out to be a bit too good to be true. The accounts claimed to be covered by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, but evidently they were not. Robinhood is now going back to the drawing board with the product.
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