Techmeme
October 20, 2020, 1:25 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
DOJ and 11 state AGs, all Republican, file a suit alleging that Google acted anticompetitively to preserve monopolies in search and search advertising  —  Lawsuit follows lengthy investigation and seeks to break company's grip over search traffic  —  The Justice Department filed …
Kent Walker / The Keyword:
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
iPhone 12 review: has an excellent camera, display, and design, promising MagSafe ecosystem, but battery life is inferior to iPhone 11's and it's more expensive  —  It's the one you should get unless you're waiting for the Max or mini  —  More than most years, there are a lot of things that are new in the iPhone 12.
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
iPhone 12 Pro review: has an excellent camera and performance, Dolby Vision video is great, 5G can be very fast, but battery life is inferior to iPhone 11 Pro  —  5G, LIDAR, MagSafe — the new iPhone 12 Pro has a lot of things you won't be able to do much with right now
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Microsoft partners with SpaceX for satellite-powered internet connectivity on Azure and debuts Azure Space, a set of products for the space-related cloud market  —  Microsoft is using its ‘Amazon is your competitor’ playbook to try to win over more satellite partners and customers.
Bloomberg:
Intel agrees to sell its NAND memory unit to SK Hynix for about $9B; the acquisition includes Intel's solid-state drive, NAND flash, and wafer businesses  —  - U.S. chipmaker has fallen behind in a chip manufacturing race  —  Intel Corp. agreed to sell its Nand memory unit …
James Vincent / The Verge:
Researchers find a Telegram bot that takes a person's photo and turns it into a fake nude; by July, 100K+ images of women had been transformed, shared publicly  —  Bots have been used to create more than 100,000 images  —  Researchers have discovered a “deepfake ecosystem” …
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Adobe debuts improvements to Creative Cloud, with Neural Filters in Photoshop, Illustrator coming to iPad, Adobe Fresco coming to iPhone, and more  —  Adobe holds an annual MAX conference each year, and this year's event is free for everyone for the first time because it is being held virtually rather than in person.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Instagram adds a new way for creators to make money by rolling out premium badges for fans on Instagram Live  —  Instagram is today introducing a new way for creators to make money.  The company is now rolling out badges in Instagram Live to an initial group of over 50,000 creators …
Amrith Ramkumar / Wall Street Journal:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Handshake, a diversity-focused LinkedIn for college students, raises $80M Series D led by GGV, source says at a $550M-$600M valuation  —  College graduates this year (and perhaps in the near-term) have been looking for work in what is one of the most challenging job markets in a decade due …
The Guardian:
UK and US say Russian military intelligence services were planning a cyberattack on the Olympics and Paralympics in Tokyo, originally scheduled for this summer  —  Patrick Wintour in London, Julian Borger in Washington  —  Russian military intelligence services were planning a cyber-attack …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal:
New mathematical model-based research suggests that exposing US social media users to viewpoints different than their own furthers political polarization  —  Mathematicians are teaming up with political scientists to create models of how social media divides us, and results suggest at least …
Corbin Davenport / Android Police:
Google confirms it's discontinuing Nest Secure, a home security system it introduced in 2017, but will continue to support existing users  —  Google released the Nest Guard in 2017 as a simple security system with motion sensors and a keypad, but it never received an upgrade, even as other Nest devices were updated again and again.

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:
Stop re-entering Shopify order details in Zoho CRM  —  This is a guest blog from Xapplets (Zeeyes AI Inc).Here's a scene that plays out in many growing Shopify stores every day: a customer places an order …
IDrive:
IDrive Autonomy: low-cost L2+ driver assistance with AI  —  L2+ driver assistance with a scalable AI stack built for automotive companies and laying the foundation for the autonomous future.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
GPT-6 & OpenAI's Comeback, Hugging Face Attack Debate, Ballmer's Scandalous Legacy
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.
Hard Fork:
The A.I. Mob That Attacked Hugging Face + METR's Ajeya Cotra
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Data Centers, Elon Musk, and the New Politics of Tech, with David Weigel
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.
Sources:
Sam Altman on OpenAI's next model and the AI backlash
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.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Brian Singerman from GPx
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
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 1:25 PM ET, October 20, 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

Cristiano Lima / Politico:
Joe Rossignol / MacRumors:
Andrew Tarantola / Engadget: