Techmeme
November 15, 2020, 5:50 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
A look at Parler, a social network with little moderation, which is backed by Rebekah Mercer and saw its user base more than double to 10M in under a week  —  The libertarian-minded platform aims to challenge tech giants through a focus on free speech; surge in users since the election
Phil Vachon / Security Embedded:
A deep dive into OCSP responder Apple uses to verify integrity of Mac apps, which is a critical part of macOS security, but could benefit from more transparency  —  On November 12, 2020 Apple released macOS Big Sur.  In the hours after the release went live, somewhere in Apple's infrastructure …
Max Weinbach / Android Police:
Whitney Kimball / Gizmodo:
Airbnb says 1.4M users have rejected its non-discrimination agreement, foregoing their use of the platform, since it implemented the policy in 2016  —  In the four years since it implemented an agreement to promote equitable treatment of its users, Airbnb claims that 1.4 million individuals …
Stephen Nellis / Reuters:
Qualcomm has received a US license to sell some 4G smartphone chips to Huawei  —  (Reuters) - Qualcomm Inc on Friday received a license from the U.S. government to sell 4G mobile phone chips to China's Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, an exemption to U.S. trade restrictions imposed amid rising tensions with China.
Lisa Stiffler / GeekWire:
Profile of Tom Alberg, an early investor in Amazon, the founder of Madrona Venture Group, and a key figure in shaping the Pacific Northwest's tech economy  —  It was the mid 1990s, and Tom Alberg had a decision to make.  —  Jeff Bezos had arrived in Seattle and was looking for investors for his nascent virtual bookstore.
Cyrus Farivar / NBC News:
Report: most major tech companies in Silicon Valley have kept paying their thousands of unionized blue-collar workers for now, but future remains uncertain  —  Nora Morales, 57, an overnight janitor at Google's main campus in Mountain View, California, knows better than anyone else how empty Silicon Valley's offices have become.
Owen Hughes / TechRepublic:
Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, who first began work on the language in 1979 and still remains very much involved in its development  —  Powerful, flexible, complex: The origins of C++ date back 40 years, yet it remains one of the most widely used programming languages today.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Microsoft says it detected three APTs, from N. Korea and Russia, that launched attacks on at least seven companies developing a COVID-19 vaccine or treatments  —  The three state-sponsored hacker groups (APTs) are Russia's Strontium (Fancy Bear) and North Korea's Zinc (Lazarus Group) and Cerium.
Yogita Khatri / The Block:
US regulators have levied $198M in fines against crypto firms to date, of which $175M came from SEC and $23M from CFTC  —  The top two U.S. market regulators — the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — have hit crypto firms and founders …

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Earlier Picks

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