10 things in tech you need to know today

Kanye WEst

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Monday.

  1. On Friday, Microsoft won the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract — clinching it over Amazon, which was thought to be the frontrunner. Microsoft and Amazon had been competing for this key Pentagon contract for over a year.
  2. Amazon Web Services is "still evaluating options" after the Department of Defense selected Microsoft for a $10 billion contract to move the agency's database to the cloud, according to a source close to the situation. An AWS spokesperson said the firm was "surprised" by the decision to pick Microsoft.
  3. Business Insider was able to easily run ads on Facebook that made blatantly misleading claims about the hot-button political topics of immigration and guns, despite the social network claiming that it fact-checks ads. One ad repeated the false rumor that undocumented immigrants who participate in the 2020 census will be deported
  4. Facebook included far-right Breitbart News in its new 'high quality' news tab. Breitbart News is highly controversial, as its former executive chairman-turned-campaign mastermind for President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, told a reporter in 2016 that the site is "the platform for the alt-right."
  5. Don Valentine, founder of Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital died on Friday, the firm said. Valentine spent nearly 40 years working in Silicon Valley, and Sequoia Capital is widely credited with cementing California's Bay Area as the tech powerhouse it is today.
  6. Samsung's 'Space Selfie' satellite made a crash landing on a Michigan couple's property. The satellite was part of Samsung's 'Space Selfie' campaign and came just days after actress Cara Delevingne took the service's first selfie at an event in London.
  7. Google is making a fundamental change to its search engine, calling the update 'perhaps one of the biggest since the beginning.' With the update, Google is looking to better understand all the words users type in the Search box, not just keywords, including important words that give context to a question, like "to" or "for."
  8. Kanye West said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is his favorite founder in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music released Thursday. He also called social-media apps like Instagram "modern-day cigarettes" and didn't seem to be such a fan of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
  9. President Donald Trump on Friday berated Apple CEO Tim Cook for removing the iPhone home button, which was removed in new models starting in 2017. He tweeted: "To Tim: The Button on the IPhone was FAR better than the Swipe!"
  10. Two ex-Googlers have detailed how they got funding from Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian and tennis star Serena Williams for their crypto tax startup CoinTracker without a pitch deck. Chandan Lodha and Jon Lerner are the founders behind CoinTracker, which allows people to calculate what tax they have to pay on their cryptocurrency gains.

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