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

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Lily Hay Newman / Wired: