Techmeme
April 15, 2020, 12:10 AM

Top News

Jay Greene / Washington Post:
Amazon fires two tech workers who'd been warned for publicly criticizing its warehouse workplace conditions and were outspoken critics of its climate stance  —  The workers had been outspoken critics of the e-commerce giant's climate policies and were previously warned about making public comments about its business
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Amazon will cut commission rates for its affiliate program starting April 21; amount of drop dependent on category, rates for grocery products dropping 5% to 1%  —  - Amazon on Tuesday told members of its affiliates program that it will cut commission rates beginning April 21.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
OnePlus 8 review: has great battery life and solid performance with a 90Hz display, but camera could be better and it lacks wireless charging and an IP rating  —  The traditional strengths, plus the traditional omissions  —  Video by Alix Diaconis and Vjeran Pavic
Andrei Frumusanu / AnandTech:
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Ina Fried / Axios:
Sources: Google has made significant progress toward developing its own processor that will power Pixel smartphones as soon as next year and future Chromebooks  —  Google has made significant progress toward developing its own processor to power future versions of its Pixel smartphone as soon as next year …
CNBC:
Apple launches a tool that shows how well people are social distancing, using anonymized data from Apple Maps, similar to efforts from Google  —  - Apple on Tuesday launched a new tool that shows how well people are following social distancing guidelines.  — It gathers anonymous data …
Miles Kruppa / Financial Times:
Sources: Airbnb raises another $1B in debt from investors including Apollo Global and Silver Lake, after raising a similar $1B funding round last week  —  New debt finance deal comes a week after an equal-sized funding round to help weather crisis  —  Airbnb is raising $1bn of senior debt …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
YouTube launches Video Builder, a simple, free DIY tool to help SMBs create short videos  —  YouTube today is launching a new tool aimed at small businesses who need a simple, low-cost way to create videos, but may not have the creative experience or technical know-how required to do so.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Facebook debuts Kit, an Apple Watch app, for one-tap communication with close friends via audio recording, emoji, location sharing, scribble, more  —  Facebook's internal R&D group has today launched a new app that lets you keep up with your close friends via your Apple Watch.
Nat Friedman / The GitHub Blog:
GitHub announces private repositories with unlimited collaborators are now free and reduces the price of the existing paid Team plan from $9 to $4 per month  —  All of the core GitHub features are now free for everyone.  🎉  —  Until now, if your organization wanted to use GitHub …
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Microsoft issues fixes for 15 “critical” and 93 “important” flaws, including at least three Windows zero-days  —  Today is Microsoft's April 2020 Patch Tuesday, and with everything going on, it is going to be particularly stressful for Windows administrators, so be especially nice to them today.
Andy Patrizio / Ars Technica:
Folding@Home, a ~20 year-old distributed computing project aiding scientific research, has seen a surge in users, breaking an exaFLOP of compute amid COVID-19  —  Folding@Home had settled into a low-profile niche.  Then came COVID-19.  —  Almost 20 years ago, faculty in the chemistry department …
Paresh Dave / Reuters:
Cisco says it is launching a $2.5B financing program to let customers defer 95% of payments until 2021, as business operations move online during the pandemic  —  OAKLAND, California (Reuters) - Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O) on Tuesday launched a $2.5 billion financing program that lets …
Wolfie Zhao / CoinDesk:
China is ready to launch its first domestic blockchain platform, Blockchain Service Network, for application development; platform hints at global expansion  —  China is about to launch its national blockchain platform, part of the country's grand strategy to lead the digital transformation of the world economy.

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Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:
Cory Weinberg / The Information:
TechCrunch: