Techmeme
July 19, 2020, 2:15 PM

Top News

Kira Tebbe / OneZero :
In 2019, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were collectively granted ~27,000 H-1B visas, over 30% of total visas available to private companies  —  Five tech companies use nearly 30,000 H1-B visas, while over 50% of graduate STEM degrees are earned by international students
Delian Asparouhov / Operators & Delian's Ramblings:
Despite its limitations, GPT-3, OpenAI's text-generating AI, excels at producing follow-on thoughts to input text, and could thus succeed as a “writing buddy”  —  OpenAI, an AI research foundation started by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and a few other leaders in ML …
Suzanne Vranica / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Disney has dramatically cut ad spending on Facebook and Instagram; Disney was Facebook's top US advertiser for H1 2020, per an estimate  —  Hundreds of advertisers have paused spending on the social network due to concerns about hate speech, divisive content
Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal:
Retail stores, which were closing due to declining foot traffic even before the pandemic, are now increasingly being turned into online fulfillment centers  —  As the demand for in-person shopping diminishes, landlords, startups and retailers are converting abandoned stores into online fulfillment centers
Shaun Nichols / The Register:
Researchers say seven Hong Kong-based “no log” VPNs have left 1TB+ of user logs and personally identifiable info exposed on the internet  —  Maybe it was the old Lionel Hutz play: 'No-logging VPN?  I meant, no!  Logging VPN!'  —  BIO EMAIL TWITTER
Olivia Solon / NBC News:
Profile of Child Rescue Coalition, whose tech is used in 96 countries including the US to help police triage child porn cases, as experts raise privacy concerns  —  BOCA RATON, Fla. — In December 2016, law enforcement agents seized computers and hard drives from the home of Tay Christopher Cooper …
Nikhil Basu Trivedi / next big thing:
A look at the bifurcation of the VC industry between agglomerators, who invest at every stage and across every sector, and specialists, who focus on one  —  Welcome to issue #10 of next big thing.  —  On one side of the venture capital industry are the agglomerator firms.
More: Protocol
Dave Furness / eSellerCafe:
Amazon warns third party sellers it may separate Fulfillment by Amazon operations in UK from its EU network starting January 1  —  Unsurprising for some but surely a shock for others today as Amazon has announced that due to Brexit on the 1st January 2021 the UK's FBA operations will be separated from the rest of Europe.
Twitter:
Twitter provides an overview of what it knows about Wednesday's hack so far: how it happened, what the attackers accessed, how it reacted, and the next steps  —  As we've been informing via the @TwitterSupport account, on Wednesday, July 15, 2020, we detected a security incident at Twitter and took immediate action.
New York Times:
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Kari Soo Lindberg / Bloomberg:
Trump campaign urges supporters to sign a petition to ban TikTok, saying TikTok has been caught “red handed by monitoring what is on your phone's Clipboard”  —  - Ads are targeting supporters in battleground election states  — Teens on TikTok signed up to Trump rally with no plans to go

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More News

Jennifer Miller / New York Times:

Earlier Picks

Erin Griffith / New York Times: