Mr. Starcraft goes to Washington

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If someone offers you a deal on an iPhone X are you sure it wasn’t stolen? Starcraft II may be free, but are humans still better players? Tech giants get grilled by the senate. These stories and more on this week’s Geek Speak

Villains swipe hundreds of iPhone X units from UPS delivery van

Police: “It appears the suspects knew what they were looking for.”

StarCraft II goes free-to-play seven years after launch

Single-player campaign, ranked multiplayer available free of charge.

Humans Are Still Better Than AI at StarCraft—for Now

A StarCraft gamer won 4-0 in the world’s first contest between AI systems and professional human players.

The Super-Aggregators and the Russians – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

This is why I was confused that Senator Warner made a big deal out of the fact Facebook was paid in Russian Rubles: the entire premise of the company’s revenue model is that anyone can run an ad without having to talk to another human, and obviously a key component of such a model is supporting multiple currencies.

Tech Goes to Washington – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

The single most compelling line of questioning came from Louisiana junior Senator John Kennedy; first, he exposed the company’s implied claims that they could actually fix the problem as a sham:

Intel and AMD team up: A future Core chip will have Radeon graphics inside

Arch-rivals AMD and Intel have teamed up to co-design an Intel Core microprocessor with a custom AMD Radeon graphics core inside the processor package, aimed at bringing top-tier gaming to thin-and-light notebook PCs.

San Francisco Just Took a Huge Step Toward Internet Utopia

San Francisco became the first major city in America to pledge to connect all of its homes and businesses to a fiber optic network.