Techmeme
July 9, 2020, 3:55 PM

Top News

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Sony invests $250M in Epic Games for a 1.4% stake, bringing the total raised by the maker of Fortnite to $17.86B  —  VB TRANSFORM  —  The AI event for business leaders  —  Hosted Online  —  July 15 - 17  —  Learn More  —  Sony has invested $250 million for a minority stake …
Jon Porter / The Verge:
Epic Games releases an iOS app, called Live Link Face, enabling the recording of facial expressions directly into the Unreal Engine  —  Using Apple's ARKit and the iPhone's TrueDepth camera  —  A newly released iOS app from Epic Games lets developers record facial expressions …
Anirban Sen / Reuters:
Sources: Coinbase is exploring going public via a direct listing as early as this year; Coinbase was last valued at $8B+ in 2018  —  Anirban Sen, Joshua Franklin, Anna Irrera  —  (Reuters) - Coinbase Inc has started plans for a stock market listing that could come as early as this year …
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Hands-on with iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 as they launch in public beta with a new home screen with widgets on the iPhone, a Scribble feature for Apple Pencil, more  —  There are so many new features that it's hard to keep track  —  In anticipation of today's release of the public betas of iOS 14 …
Alfred Ng / CNET:
UK and Australian data privacy offices say they are opening a joint investigation of Clearview AI  —  The facial recognition company is being scrutinized over its database of 3 billion photos.  —  The governments of the UK and Australia are investigating a facial recognition company …
Joseph Cox / VICE:
Police are buying access to hacked data, including passwords, IP addresses, and more to help with investigations in an end-run around the usual legal processes  —  The sale is “an end-run around the usual legal processes.”  —  Joseph Cox  —  Hackers break into websites, steal information …
Nico Grant / Bloomberg:
Google scrapped a campus security system asking employees to check colleagues' badges, sources say after complaints Black and Latinx workers were singled out  —  - Company encouraged staff to check colleagues' ID badges  — System scrapped after workers complained to CEO Sundar Pichai
Bloomberg:
Elon Musk claims Tesla is “very close” to developing fully autonomous vehicles despite Tesla's “Full Self Driving” feature not living up to its name since 2016  —  - The billionaire says it'll have basics worked out this year  — Tesla's in an industry race to develop fully self-driven cars
Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
In a first, the CENTRE Consortium has blocked an Ethereum address holding $100K USDC stablecoin in response to a law enforcement request  —  The CENTRE Consortium blacklisted a USDC address in response to a law enforcement request, freezing $100,000 worth of the stablecoin, a spokesperson said Wednesday.
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Sensor Tower: of the ~910K users that signed up for Quibi's 3-month free trial in April, only 8%, ~72K, converted to a paid subscription after the trial ended  —  The struggling streaming video platform has a not-so-great conversion rate  —  Streaming service Quibi only managed to convert …
Sam Biddle / The Intercept:
Sources: Dataminr, an official Twitter partner, relayed tweets and other social media posts about BLM protests directly to police, contrary to earlier claims  —  Leveraging close ties to Twitter, controversial artificial intelligence startup Dataminr helped law enforcement digitally monitor …
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
Apple says it remains “committed to the future of Thunderbolt and will support it in Macs with Apple silicon”  —  Apple silicon will still work with Intel's port standard  —  Apple is moving away from Intel's chipsets in favor of its new, custom-designed ARM chips …
Chuong Nguyen / Digital Trends:

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.
Cape:
Most carriers track everything.  Cape doesn't.  —  Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more.  Switch today and get 29% off for life.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
Zoho WorkDrive named a Leader in the Nucleus Research CSC Technology Value Matrix 2026  —  Enterprise content management is evolving rapidly with about 80% of the data unstructured.  The growing challenge is not about storing information anymore.
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:
OpenAI's Bots Break Containment and Hack Hugging Face Autonomously — With Alex Stamos
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.
Great Chat:
Too big to laugh: how tech lost its sense of humor
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Substack Wants To Become A Social Network; Beehiiv Wants To Stay Invisible
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.
Training Data:
Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming 'Dark Factory' Where Software Builds Itself
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.
Invest Like the Best:
Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:55 PM ET, July 9, 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

Sue Halpern / New Yorker:

Earlier Picks

Washington Post:
Ina Fried / Axios:
Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
Mike Isaac / New York Times: