Techmeme
August 5, 2019, 12:20 AM

Top News

Robert Evans / bellingcat:
El Paso, the third mass shooting announced on 8chan, shows how its /pol/ board deliberately radicalizes users into mass shooters and gamifies massacring people  —  On August 3, 2019, at around 11am local time, initial police reports indicated that a gunman had walked into an El Paso Wal-Mart and opened fire.
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
Cloudflare says it will stop providing 8chan with DDoS protection services, but 8chan's domain registrar, Tucows, says it has no plans to ban the site  —  Fredrick Brennan was getting ready for church at his home in the Philippines when the news of a mass shooting in El Paso arrived.
Matthew Prince / The Cloudflare Blog:
Cloudflare CEO on why the company terminated DDoS protection service for 8chan: the site was “lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths”  —  The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio are horrific tragedies.  In the case of the El Paso shooting …
Ryan Broderick / BuzzFeed News:
If 8chan vanished, its users would likely just flock to a new copycat site, like how 4chan users switched to 8chan amid increased moderation during Gamergate  —  “If 8chan is shutdown here is what will happen: someone else will spin up a new imageboard, say 20chan or whatever.  People will flock to that."
Maddy Myers / Kotaku:
E3 website leaks personal info, including addresses and phone numbers, of 2,000+ reporters and content creators; E3 has removed file but data still circulates  —  A spreadsheet containing the contact information and personal addresses of over 2,000 games journalists, editors …
Karen Hao / MIT Technology Review:
A look at edtech startups like Squirrel AI that are using AI to personalize learning in China, where fierce academic competition is driving an AI education boom  —  In recent years, the country has rushed to pursue “intelligent education.”  Now its billion-dollar ed-tech companies are planning to export their vision overseas.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Report: out of 188,620 extensions available on the Chrome Web Store, ~50% have fewer than 16 installs and 87% have fewer than 1,000; only 13 have 10M+ users  —  Around 87% of all Google Chrome extensions have fewer than 1,000 installs.  —  There are 188,620 extensions available on the Chrome Web Store …
Alex Wilhelm / Crunchbase News:
WeWork has acquired at least six software companies related to real estate, possibly to build a software stack that it can sell to other real estate companies  —  This week WeWork, also known as The We Company and best known for its global coworking business, is adding another software company to its portfolio of acquisitions.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cape:
Most carriers track everything.  Cape doesn't.  —  Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more.  Switch today and get 29% off for life.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
Pro tips: 5 ways to close WhatsApp leads in Zoho CRM  —  This is a guest post by Orkhan Jafarli, Growth PM at TimelinesAI.More buyers now reach out on WhatsApp before they ever fill out a form.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
What Happens If AI Fails?, Subprime Data Center Crisis, How Bad Can SpaceX Get?
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Hard Fork:
OpenAI Models Go Rogue + Kimi K3 Freakout + A.I. Superforecasting
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
The Talk Show With John Gruber:
'A Scam Held Together With Patriotism and Golden Paint', With Quinn Nelson
The director's commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.
Subscribe to The Talk Show With John Gruber.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Abridge's Shiv Rao: The Doctor Founder Taking On Microsoft In Healthcare AI
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Great Chat:
Too big to laugh: how tech lost its sense of humor
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:20 AM ET, August 5, 2019.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Sharon Terlep / Wall Street Journal:

Earlier Picks

Ben Riley-Smith / Telegraph:
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch: