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Tech News Today for July 27, 2017

Tech News for Thursday July 27, 2017

Twitter released its quarterly earnings, and things aren’t looking so hot on the user growth side of things. Read more at recode.net.

Amazon reported earnings today and with it, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also made news with his own earnings. For a brief shining moment, Bezos was the new richest person in the world, with a small fortune of 90 billion dollars, beating out Bill Gates. The surge in Bezos's wealth was not due to him opening an Instagram account, which he did this week, but because of a surge in Amazon shares ahead of the earnings reports. But when the earnings report failed to meet expectations, Bezos fell back to the #2 spot. Still, by all accounts, Amazon is an unstoppable force with no immovable objects in its way, except maybe the FTC. Read more at qz.com.

Samsung keeps kicking butt, brushing aside its many issues with the one thing that matters most: Profit. Samsung’s net profit rose 89% year over year, up to 11.05 trillion won or around $9.9 billion dollars. That’s its highest quarterly net profit beating its previous record of 8.24 trillion won from the height of the smartphone boom four years ago. 70% of its success came not from smartphones but its semiconductor and display business, but the company did say the Galaxy S8 outsold the S7 in nearly all regions. Read more at wsj.com.

The Senate introduced new legislation today called the Electronic Communications Privacy Modernization Act, that aims to revamp the current Electronics Communications Act. The current rules around whether law enforcement needs a warrant to access your email and location data were established the same year Madonna's Papa Don't Preach and Huey Lewis and the News, "Stuck on You" were number one on the billboard charts. 1986, in case you're too lazy to Google it. Google is also something that didn't exist when the Electronics Communication Act was written. Tireless electronic privacy activists and BiPartisan buddies Republican senator Mike Lee from Utah and democratic senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont introduced the bill. Read more at theverge.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Kurt Wagner of Recode to talk about Twitter's quarterly earnings, and Kate Conger from Gizmodo to talk about the legal battle between Alphabet's Waymo and Uber. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. Subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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