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Hashtag Trending – Huawei’s woes; Chrome update mutes autoplay ads; LinkedIn’s top companies to work for

Huawei’s plans for U.S. expansion hit another road bump, Chrome’s next update will put a stop to autoplay video ads with sound, and a LinkedIn list of top companies to work for is dominated by technology giants.

Trending on Google, Best Buy will no longer sell Huawei smartphones. The largest electronics retailer in the U.S. plans to stop selling the devices over the next few weeks. CNet is reporting this story based on an anonymous source, and neither Best Buy or Huawei has confirmed the news. If true, it’s the latest barrier to Huawei’s attempts to expand its presence in the U.S. since intelligence officials expressed concerns about it. In February, FBI Director Chris Wray raised the prospect that Huawei’s telecommunications products could be used for undetected espionage by China. Recently, Huawei has also seen carrier deals with AT&T and Verizon be abandoned.

Popular on Reddit, the next update to Chrome will put an end to autoplay videos with sound. If you’ve ever been annoyed by an unexpected video blaring out of your speakers while at work, you’ll probably appreciate this. Chrome version 66 will only play autoplay videos if there is no sound playing by default. That’d be in line with how Facebook currently display videos in its timeline, for example. Now if you’re a publisher that was hoping to sell some expensive ad slots for this type of things, I guess you’re out of luck. You’ll just have to run some more ads from Google’s network instead.

Trending on LinkedIn, is LinkedIn’s own list of top companies to work for in 2018. No surprise, tech companies dominated the top spots. Amazon is the number one company that U.S. professionals want to work at in 2018. It’s followed by Google’s parent company Alphabet in second and Facebook in third. Cloud business softare firm Salesforce is in fourth and Elon Musk’s Tesla round out the top five. LinkedIn says its rankings are based on interest shown in the companies, engagement with top employees, job demand, and employee retention. By the way, LinkedIn excludes itself and parent company Microsoft from the list.

That’s what’s trending today. Hashtag Trending is produced by IT World Canada. Today’s episode is sponsored by Cogeco Peer 1, the company that enables businesses to unlock their IT potential. Learn more at CP1.com.

If you review Hashtag Trending on Amazon, I’ll read it here. Kim F writes “Perfect length to keep me updated on all the important tech news of the day.”