Techmeme
May 25, 2020, 8:40 PM

Top News

Ryan Broderick / BuzzFeed News:
An in-depth look at the baseless conspiracies attempting to turn Bill Gates into the pandemic's villain, widely shared on Facebook and YouTube  —  After months of conspiracy-mongering, people around the world are demanding Gates be arrested for crimes against humanity.  Here's how things got so bad.
Mark Scott / Politico:
With GDPR's two-year anniversary today, the Irish Data Protection Commission is under pressure to act, amid doubts about the agency's enforcement ability  —  Ireland's Data Protection Commission is under pressure to act, and act soon.  —  Facebook's European headquarters in Dublin.
Stephanie Bodoni / Bloomberg:
Ben Smith / New York Times:
How services like Cameo and Substack have opened up new ways for prominent media figures and journalists to make a living from smaller audiences  —  With short videos and paid newsletters, everyone from superstars to half-forgotten former athletes and even journalists can, as one tech figure put it, “monetize individuality.”
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Google says ~70% of all serious security bugs in Chrome, largely written in C/C++, are memory safety flaws, after analyzing 912 security bugs fixed since 2015  —  Google software engineers are looking into ways of eliminating memory management-related bugs from Chrome.
John Markoff / New York Times:
Computer scientist Ben Shneiderman argues against the move towards full robotic automation, saying such moves absolve humans of ethical responsibilities  —  A computer scientist argues that the quest for fully automated robots is misguided, perhaps even dangerous.  His decades of warnings are gaining more attention.
Josh Taylor / The Guardian:
Australia's COVIDSafe tracking app has faded into near-irrelevance, falling far short of a target to reach 40% of Australians  —  The PM told Australians in April the contact tracing app was key to getting back to normal but just one person has been identified using its data
Zheping Huang / Bloomberg:
Sensor Tower data: TikTok and Chinese twin app Douyin topped the charts globally for in-app purchases in April, generating $78M, up 10x from April 2019  —  - ByteDance's popular video-sharing platform keeps rising  — Douyin, TikTok's China version, contributed 87% of revenue
Ryan Tracy / Wall Street Journal:
FCC may move ahead with a $16B plan to boost rural broadband access, even without a clear picture of service gaps, as ISPs' coverage data lacks granularity  —  Under FCC's latest plan to fund to internet providers' service expansions, many rural customers who lack broadband could be counted as already having it

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.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
OneAuth + iOS 27: Login Smart With The Latest Foundation Model  —  We're used to doing certain things the same way every day.If a sign-in request arrives, we automatically approve or deny.
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:
A Sober Conversation About AI Existential Risk — With Nate Soares
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.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Invest Like the Best:
Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Sources:
Baseten's CEO on why every company will want to own its AI
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Training Data:
Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Andrew Feldman from Cerebras
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 8:40 PM ET, May 25, 2020.

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

Earlier Picks

Lily Hay Newman / Wired: