10 things in tech you need to know today

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1. Oracle has thrown fresh confusion on its deal to buy part of TikTok after saying that owner ByteDance will have no ownership stake in the new TikTok Global. In a statement on Monday, Oracle announced that its new TikTok venture will be entirely divested from ByteDance, contradicting previous reports of the agreed deal between the two companies, per The Verge. 
2. Microsoft bought the massive video-game publisher behind game franchises like ‘Doom,’ ‘Fallout,’ and ‘The Elder Scrolls’ in a major coup that cost $7.5 billion. The announcement came one day before preorders open for Microsoft’s next-gen Xbox consoles, the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.
3. Chinese leaders are split over the potential release of a blacklist of US companies. Officials in Beijing are wary of targeting US tech firms until after November’s presidential election, the Wall Street Journal reported.
4. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked in an interview how top Facebook employees can ‘look themselves in the mirror’ because they ‘make money off poison.’ House Speaker Pelosi has criticized Facebook in the past, particularly after the company last year refused to take down a doctored video that made her appear drunk. 
5. Quibi is reportedly exploring strategic options including a possible sale. Quibi, which launched in April, has struggled to attract subscribers with its short-form, mobile-focused originals in the increasingly crowded streaming space.
6. The US Justice Department is poised to brief states on its pending antitrust lawsuit against Google. The renewed spotlight comes as tech giants more broadly face a reckoning over their scale and influence, the Washington Post reported. 
7. Nikola founder Trevor Milton resigned from the company’s board following fraud allegations. Hindenburg Research, a short-seller, published a lengthy report accusing the electric truck maker Nikola of fraud on September 10.
8. A new startup is recruiting gig workers to help landlords evict people from their homes, describing itself as the fastest-growing moneymaking gig because of COVID-19. The CDC is imposing a moratorium on all evictions across the US, but Civvl’s terms appear to pass on responsibility to landlords to ensure that evictions carried out through the startup are legal.
9. Arm’s cofounder Hermann Hauser warned that Donald Trump would take the ‘opportunity to screw China’ with the $40 billion Nvidia deal. The sale of Arm to Nvidia has provoked controversy in the UK amid fears Arm could become a pawn in US President Donald Trump’s trade war with China.
10. Twitter is investigating after users found its picture-cropping tool favored white faces. Users began to notice that the algorithm behind Twitter’s automatic cropping tool appeared to be systematically favoring white faces.

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