Social media companies step up battle against militant propaganda

By Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook, Google and Twitter are stepping up efforts to combat online propaganda and recruiting by Islamic militants, but the Internet companies are doing it quietly to avoid the perception that they are helping the authorities police the Web. On Friday, Facebook Inc said it took down a profile that the company believed belonged to San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband is accused of killing 14 people in a mass shooting that the FBI is investigating as an “act of terrorism.” Just a day earlier, the French prime minister and European Commission officials met separately with Facebook, Google, Twitter Inc and other companies to demand faster action on what the commission called “online terrorism incitement and hate speech.” The Internet companies described their policies as straightforward: they ban certain types of content in accordance with their own terms of service, and require court orders to remove or block anything beyond that.

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Square IPO priced at 30 percent discount to last private funding

By Heather Somerville SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Mobile payments company Square Inc set a price range on Friday for its highly anticipated initial public offering that values the company at up to $4.2 billion, a 30 percent discount to its valuation at its last fundraising round. San Francisco-based Square, which is headed by Twitter Inc Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, is one of the most prominent “unicorns,” or private companies valued at more than $1 billion, to make a public debut this year

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Exclusive: Uber checks connections between hacker and Lyft

By Dan Levine and Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Eight months after disclosing a major data breach, ride service Uber [UBER.UL] is focusing its legal efforts on learning more about an internet address that it has persuaded a court could lead to identifying the hacker. In February, Uber revealed that as many as 50,000 of its drivers' names and license numbers had been improperly downloaded, and the company filed a lawsuit in San Francisco federal court in an attempt to unmask the perpetrator. Uber's court papers claim that an unidentified person using a Comcast IP address had access to a security key used in the breach.

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China’s new tech rules play to local firms’ strengths

By Gerry Shih, Michael Martina and Joseph Menn BEIJING/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Draft Chinese government regulation would force technology vendors to meet stringent security tests before they can sell to China’s banks, an acceleration of efforts to curb the country’s reliance on foreign technology that has drawn a sharp response from U.S.

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Tencent inks exclusive online partnership for NBA games in China

By Gerry Shih BEIJING (Reuters) – The National Basketball Association and Tencent Holdings Ltd said Friday the Shenzhen-based Internet giant will be the only company in China to stream the league’s online content. The exclusive, five-year deal will allow Tencent to offer for the first time in China the NBA’s League Pass package, which allows subscribers to watch a full season’s worth of games live and on-demand.

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