Techmeme
April 8, 2020, 5:40 PM

Top News

Michael McWhertor / Polygon:
Google makes Stadia free to use for anyone with a Gmail address and will give new users two months of Stadia Pro for free  —  Stadia Pro is also free for two months  —  Google's video game streaming platform, Stadia, is now free to anyone with a Gmail address, the company announced on Wednesday.
Eric S. Yuan / Zoom Blog:
Zoom gives updates on its progress with privacy and security: appointing a CISO Council and Advisory Board and bringing on Alex Stamos as an outside advisor  —  As I mentioned in my message on April 1, Zoom has seen tremendous growth and new use cases emerge over the past few weeks …
Richard Nieva / CNET:
Google says Meet, its teleconferencing tool, is adding 2M new users a day and logged 2B minutes of video calls in March with daily usage up 25x from January  —  As people around the world hunker down in their homes to slow the spread of COVID-19, one technology has emerged as a lifeline to the outside world: video chat.
Thomas Brewster / Forbes:
UK's NCSC and US DHS publish a list of 2,500 COVID-19-related threats they are tracking, including malicious websites and email addresses linked to scams  —  If you weren't already taking the rise of coronavirus-based cybercrime seriously, take note.  A rare joint alert has gone out from U.S …
Luke O'Brien / HuffPost:
Investigation details facial recognition company Clearview AI's ties to the alt-right, including hiring employees with deep links to far-right extremists  —  Clearview AI, which has alarmed privacy experts, hired several far-right employees, a HuffPost investigation found.
Adam Cancryn / Politico:
Sources: White House team led by Jared Kushner has reached out to health tech companies about creating a real-time surveillance system for tracking COVID-19  —  White House senior adviser Jared Kushner's task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating …
Andrei Frumusanu / AnandTech:
Evidence of benchmark cheating has been found in MediaTek chipsets used in smartphones from manufacturers including Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Sony  —  Mobile benchmark cheating has a long story that goes far back for the industry (well - at least in smartphone industry years) …
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
Twitter removes a tool that let mobile users prevent some data from being shared with advertisers; EU users are exempt and need to opt in to sharing  —  Users in Europe are the exception  —  Twitter has removed a privacy feature that allowed all users to stop sharing some private information with advertisers.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Airbnb has held talks about raising an additional $500M to $1B in debt, after announcing a $1B debt and equity deal on Monday, to weather the pandemic  —  - Company considering raising $500 million to $1 billion  — Valuation fell to $18 billion in Monday's debt-equity deal
Wall Street Journal:
Craig Timberg / Washington Post:
Study of 225 pieces of COVID-19-related content rated false or misleading: 59% remain up with no warning label on Twitter, 27% on YouTube, and 24% on Facebook  —  Facebook and YouTube do better, but still leave some misinformation up  —  More than half of the misinformation …
New York Times:
SimilarWeb and Apptopia: amid quarantines, Americans increasingly use online platforms on computers, not smartphones; Nextdoor.com traffic is up 73% from Jan.  —  Stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic, with movie theaters closed and no restaurants to dine in, Americans have been spending more of their lives online.
Talos Blog:
Cisco's Talos security group finds fingerprint scanners from Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and others can be bypassed by fake fingerprints made with 3D printing  —  Phone, computer fingerprint scanners can be defeated with 3-D printing — By Paul Rascagneres and Vitor Ventura.
Kyle Orland / Ars Technica:
Valve releases data showing rise in games making $10K during first two weeks after release but analysis suggests ~80% of games earn under $5K during same period  —  Valve offers a peek behind the sales curtain, telling an incomplete and mixed story.  —  It has been roughly two years …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft says it will make all of its events digital until July 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic  —  Build 2021 will likely be a digital event  —  Microsoft is planning to make all of its internal and external events digital-only until July 2021 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Charles Levinson / Protocol:
CEO of gay dating app Scruff talks about avoiding partnerships with location data brokers due to privacy concerns and building an in-house analytics operation  —  A few years ago, a particular type of email began showing up in the inbox of Eric Silverberg, whose gay dating app, Scruff …

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