Friday news dumps: all the news companies hoped you wouldn’t notice

Google has completely canceled Google I/O 2020, its biggest event of the year, due to the ongoing spread of the novel coronavirus. The company announced on March 3rd that it canceled the physical I/O event, but now the whole thing is off.

“Out of concern for the health and safety of our developers, employees, and local communities — and in line with recent ‘shelter in place’ orders by the local Bay Area counties — we sadly will not be holding I/O in any capacity this year,” Google said in a statement on the I/O website. “Right now, the most important thing all of us can do is focus our attention on helping people with the new challenges we all face. Please know that we remain committed to finding other ways to share platform updates with you through our developer blogs and community forums.”

HQ, which made the once-popular HQ Trivia app, is shutting down and laying off its 25 employees, according to CNN Business.

HQ CEO Rus Yusupov reportedly sent a note to employees announcing that HQ would cease operations. In the note, he said that there had been an offer “from an established business” to acquire HQ that had a closing date of tomorrow, but that the potential acquirer “suddenly changed their position.” You can read the full note below:

Randy Freer is stepping down from his role as Hulu CEO as Disney moves to consolidate its direct-to-consumer business under its own executives. Part of the decision to roll Hulu’s business operations into Disney’s direct-to-consumer division is to help “rapidly grow our presence outside the US,” according to a company press release put out Friday.

Disney hasn’t shied away from its plans to roll out Hulu in various international territories, along with its other streaming service, Disney+. The integration means Hulu executives will now report to Disney execs. Everything Hulu — and streaming-at-large — will now operate under Kevin Mayer, who heads up the division for Disney that includes Disney+, ESPN+, and now Hulu.

OnePlus has suffered a data breach: the company says an “unauthorized party” accessed some customers’ order information. In a statement, OnePlus says some customer names, contact numbers, emails, and shipping addresses “may have been exposed,” but also that “all payment information, passwords and accounts are safe.” The company began notifying affected customers today.

In an FAQ, the company says the breach was discovered last week, and that it has “inspected our website thoroughly to ensure that there are no similar security flaws.” That suggests the breach happened through the OnePlus website, perhaps the online store, rather than its phones.

Inboard Technology, an electric skateboard startup from Santa Cruz, California, is working with a liquidation firm to sell off its intellectual property and assets, The Verge has learned. All 24 employees, most of whom were located at the company’s headquarters in Santa Cruz, California, have been laid off.

The startup was one of the highest-profile competitors to top electric skateboard company Boosted, and last year announced plans to enter the electric scooter market — a push that seems to have doomed Inboard.

Microsoft has admitted that its Outlook.com security breach was worse than the company initially revealed. The software maker started notifying some Outlook.com users late on Friday night that a hacker was able to access accounts for months earlier this year. Microsoft’s notification revealed that hackers could have viewed account email addresses, folder names, and subject lines of emails, but in a separate notification to other affected users the company also admitted email contents could have been viewed.

Vice’s Motherboard revealed on Sunday that Microsoft sent a different notification message to around six percent of the affected Outlook.com accounts, and that the company only admitted this when it was presented with screenshot evidence that the breach was far worse for those customers. Microsoft discovered that a support agent’s credentials were compromised for its web mail service, allowing unauthorized access to some accounts between January 1st and March 28th, 2019.

Telltale Games, creators of episodic adventure games like The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Batman: The Enemy Within, laid off approximately 250 employees today as part of what the company is calling a “majority studio closure.” According to multiple sources The Verge spoke with, employees were let go with no severance.

“Today Telltale Games made the difficult decision to begin a majority studio closure following a year marked by insurmountable challenges,” the company said in a statement. “A majority of the company’s employees were dismissed earlier this morning.” The company will retain a small team of 25. These remaining employees will stay on “to fulfill the company’s obligations to its board and partners,” according to Telltale.

Facebook said late Friday that it had suspended Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), along with its political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, for violating its policies around data collection and retention. The companies, which ran data operations for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign, are widely credited with helping Trump more effectively target voters on Facebook than his rival, Hillary Clinton. While the exact nature of their role remains somewhat mysterious, Facebook’s disclosure suggests that the company improperly obtained user data that could have given it an unfair advantage in reaching voters.

Facebook said it cannot determine whether or how the data in question could have been used in conjunction with election ad campaigns. Cambridge Analytica did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Newly appointed FCC chairman Ajit Pai reversed a number of his predecessors’ actions this afternoon, including shutting down a series of inquiries into net neutrality violations.

While those were the more attention-grabbing changes, Pai also took actions that suggest he’s planning to alter Federal Communications Commission programs that subsidize broadband for schools and low-income families.

As 2015 drew to a close, you might be forgiven for thinking the encryption debate was all talk. There had been a lot of speeches and it was clear the FBI didn’t like Apple’s default encryption system — but what could they actually do about it? They had been leaning on Congress all year and getting nowhere.

Then, everything changed. On February 16th, the FBI took Apple to court over an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers, putting encryption at the center of the largest terrorism-linked shooting in the US in years. A similar phone-unlocking order was already being argued in New York, and the two cases plunged Apple into a legal crisis, as the company faced the possibility that a single ruling might undo years of security work.

The Justice Department has withdrawn from its legal dispute with Apple over a locked iPhone in New York, the government said in a court filing made late Friday. The department said the FBI no longer needs the company's help unlocking the phone, involved in a drug-trafficking case, as it has obtained the passcode from someone else.

The withdrawal is the second high-profile case the FBI has stepped away from in recent weeks after finding alternative means to unlocking a phone without Apple's help. Last month, the agency ended a similar case in San Bernardino after paying a third party for a way to hack into a phone. Recently, Director James Comey said the FBI paid more than $1 million for the help.

The bad news for HTC keeps rolling in. The Verge learned today that the company has laid off about thirty employees and contractors out of its HTC America division. That division has a total of around 150 employees and contractors, so the total amounts to about twenty percent of the workforce. As often happens, the employees and contractors were let go at the end of the day on Friday and sources tell The Verge that the layoffs affected multiple departments. The company confirmed the layoffs — though not the exact number — in a statement to The Verge. The statement is rather long, and it is as upbeat as it is defensive, characterizing the "reduction in force" as a "decisive action ... to streamline and optimize our organization and improve efficiencies after several years of aggressive growth."