Hackers working for Russia infiltrated the control rooms of hundreds of U.S. electric utilities, where they could have caused blackouts. The Department of Homeland Security said the hacking campaign is likely to continue. “They’ve been intruding into our networks and are positioning themselves for a limited or widespread attack,” said Michael Carpenter, former deputy assistant secretary of defense. [Rebecca Smith / The Wall Street Journal]
Recode Daily: Facebook is succeeding in spite of itself
Plus, Uber pumps the brakes as it gets back to self-driving road tests; Toronto is the boomtown for tech jobs in North America; how to photograph eternity.
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Is Facebook invincible? There are two simple ways the company could have been punished for all of its recent stumbles: Advertisers could have taken their business elsewhere, or users could have left the social network. So far, neither of those things have happened. And when Facebook reports its second-quarter results today, after market close, analysts are expecting another great quarter, including 43% revenue growth. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]
President Trump plans a $12 billion bailout to U.S. farmers who are hurting because of tariffs imposed on their goods by his own trade war.Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue described the relief as a “short-term solution that will give President Trump and his administration the time to work on long-term trade deals.” Here’s how to tell if the trade war is hurting the economy. [Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Ana Swanson / The New York Times]
Months after a fatal self-driving crash, Uber is being slower and more deliberate as it gets back on public roads to test its technology. That’s largely because it has to be. Meanwhile, Uber hit 10 billion completed trips, about a year after it hit five billion. Lyft, Uber’s main U.S. competitor, hit half a billion rides last October. And two former Uber executives are quietly operating a syndicate to invest in startups led by their former colleagues. [Johana Bhuiyan / Recode]
HBO will remain in the Bill Simmons business as the premium cable network looks to up its output under new AT&T ownership. Simmons will continue to be focused on creating and producing sports-themed content; his documentary “Andre the Giant” quickly became the most-watched documentary in HBO Sports history with nearly 7 million viewers across linear and digital platforms. [Lacey Rose / The Hollywood Reporter]
When it comes to new tech jobs, Toronto is leaving American cities in the dust. It was the fastest-growing market for such work last year, creating more jobs than the Bay Area, Seattle and Washington, D.C. combined, and leapfrogging New York. Toronto saw 28,900 tech jobs created, 14% more than in 2016, for a total of more than 241,000 workers, up 52% over the past five years. [Natalie Wong and Stefanie Marotta / Bloomberg]
Companies are waging an invisible data war online — and your phone might be an unwitting soldier. Retailers and consumer brands from Amazon and Walmart to tiny startups are using scraper bots to collect prices and other information from rivals’ websites — while evading efforts to detect and block them. [Klint Finley / Wired]
Top stories from Recode
General Counsel Colin Stretch is leaving at the end of the year.
Twitter is trying to cut back on spammy accounts.
Everyday people can now share in the stock market gains (and the losses, too!) of Silicon Valley companies.
It could be anywhere from 4 percent to 40 percent of the workforce.
This is cool
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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