Techmeme
January 16, 2020, 6:25 PM

Top News

Brad Smith / The Official Microsoft Blog:
Microsoft pledges to be carbon negative by 2030, remove all carbon it has ever emitted by 2050, and launch a $1B climate innovation fund  —  The scientific consensus is clear.  The world confronts an urgent carbon problem.  The carbon in our atmosphere has created a blanket of gas that traps heat and is changing the world's climate.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Facebook puts off its effort to build ads into WhatsApp as it focuses on B2C communications, but will sell ads in WhatsApp's Status at some point  —  Social-media giant scraps earlier strategy, seeks other ways to monetize messaging service used by 1.5 billion
Julia Alexander / The Verge:
NBC says Peacock will launch on July 15 and have a free tier with limited programming and two premium tiers, at $4.99/month with ads and $9.99/month with no ads  —  Comcast is introducing three different subscription tiers  —  NBCUniversal's streaming service, Peacock …
Lauren Feiner / CNBC:
Nancy Pelosi slams Facebook's “shameful” behaviour, saying it doesn't “care about truth” and schmoozes Trump's admin to avoid taxes and antitrust action  —  - During her weekly press briefing, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose district includes tech-heavy San Francisco …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Report: Twitch's top streamers leaving for other platforms has led to watched hours dropping 9.8% from Q3 to Q4 2019; YouTube Gaming was alone in growing in Q4  —  The loss of several big-name streamers is finally taking its toll on Twitch, according to a new report from StreamLabs and Newzoo out today.
New York Times:
Turkey lifted a two-and-a-half year ban on Wikipedia on Wednesday, restoring access after the country's top court ruled that blocking it was unconstitutional  —  The country's top court had ruled that the move was unconstitutional.  —  The Turkish government lifted a two-and-a-half-year ban …
Katie Kasunic / vpnMentor:
Personal details including uploaded government IDs of 4,000+ cam models, working for adult site PussyCash, were left exposed on an AWS S3 Bucket for days  —  The vpnMentor cybersecurity research team, led by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, have uncovered a leaking S3 Bucket with 19.95GB of visible data …
More: BBC and Yahoo Finance
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Alexis C. Madrigal / The Atlantic:
As tech becomes the dominant force in the modern economy, Silicon Valley's culture since 1970s of nimble startups successfully challenging incumbents is fading  —  For decades, whole regions, nations even, have tried to model themselves on a particular ideal of innovation, the lifeblood of the modern economy.
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Bose to close all 119 of its retail stores in N. America, Europe, Japan, and Australia due to the shift to online shopping but will maintain stores elsewhere  —  The move will result in hundreds of employees being laid off  —  Bose plans to close its entire retail store footprint in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Jon Fingas / Engadget:
Fitbit confirms it has begun the rollout of blood oxygen monitoring feature to some of its wearables  —  Fitbit's devices from recent years have blood oxygen monitoring (SpO2) hardware, but they haven't used it — until now.  Users on Reddit and elsewhere have noticed that their Versa …
Ryan Gallagher / Bloomberg:
How spyware from eSurv, which was helping police hack suspects' phones in Italy, was allegedly used by its employees to hack the phones of innocent Italians  —  After successfully creating a health care app for doctors to view medical records, Diego Fasano, an Italian entrepreneur …

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More News

Adam Bluestein / Marker:
Tom Schmidt / Dragonfly Research:

Earlier Picks

Kim Hart / Axios:
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Alan Boyle / GeekWire:
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
James Vincent / The Verge:
Abner Li / 9to5Google: