Lee Kun-hee, who was chairman and chief executive of Samsung Electronics from 1998 to 2008 and its chairman since 2010, has died at age 78  —  Mr. Lee was convicted — and pardoned — twice for white-collar crimes, in a sign of the ills in South Korea's relationship with its business dynasties.

Profile of Palantir CEO Alex Karp and the controversies around Palantir's trustworthiness; Karp claims his progressivism offsets Thiel's relationship with Trump  —  The tech giant helps governments and law enforcement decipher vast amounts of data — to mysterious and, some say, dangerous ends.

Q&A with Vint Cerf, who has been working on building an internet for space, using disruption/delay-tolerant networking (DTN) protocol, an alternative to TCP/IP  —  Vinton Cerf helped create the internet 40 years ago, and he's still working to connect people around the world — and off it.

Zoom deleted events planned for Oct. 23 on alleged censorship by the company after Zoom canceled an SFSU talk in Sept.; Zoom says the events violated its TOS  —  Zoom shut down a series of events meant to discuss what organizers called “censorship” by the company.

Patreon says it will remove accounts that actively spread QAnon's beliefs and will warn those that spread some QAnon ideas but are not dedicated to such content  —  - Accounts tied to QAnon-dedicated creators to be removed  — Followers of conspiracy theory complain of being censored

Weibo users describe how political discussions on the platform have become even more muted amid pervasive censorship, as some resort to using burner accounts  —  Thousands of Weibo accounts have been deleted as China's government cracks down on free speech.

Fitbit CEO James Park says its app reached 500,000 paid subscribers this year and talks about expectations for life under Google, competing with Apple, more  —  Fitbit CEO James Park discusses the company's new products and competition as it prepares to close its acquisition by Google

Facebook asks NYU Ad Observatory, which analyzes political ad targeting using data collected from a browser extension, to cease the practice for violating TOS  —  In letter this month, Facebook says the project violates provisions in its terms of service that prohibit bulk data collection

Sources: Big data analytics service Databricks is planning an IPO in H1, 2021; the company raised about $900M and was valued in 2019 at $6.2B  —  - Big data company is preparing IPO for first half of year  — IPO plan comes on the heels of Snowflake's successful debut

GitHub removes 18 projects related to YouTube download library youtube-dl after RIAA sent a letter saying it enabled infringement  —  Main target of the takedown was the youtube-dl project, a Python library that had amassed more than 72k stars on GitHub and was used in many YouTube video ripping tools and services.

Zest AI raises $15M for its AI-powered tech that it claims can help financial institutions reduce bias in loan portfolios, bringing its total VC funding to $87M  —  Zest AI, a company developing AI-powered loan decisioning products, today closed a $15 million funding round led by Insight Partners.