Techmeme
November 16, 2020, 8:35 PM

Top News

Abby Vollmer / The GitHub Blog:
GitHub reinstates the youtube-dl project, raises its bar for DMCA takedown requests, and creates $1M legal defense fund to help open source devs fight takedowns  —  Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project …
Jeffrey Goldberg / The Atlantic:
Barack Obama says today's online information ecosystem, which boosts conspiracy theories like QAnon, is “the single biggest threat to our democracy”  —  Barack Obama was describing to me the manner in which the Mongol emperor and war-crimes innovator Genghis Khan would besiege a town.
Financial Times:
Max Schrems' campaign group noyb files complaints with German and Spanish regulators, claiming Apple breaks EU law by letting advertisers track users via IDFA  —  Austrian activist files complaints with German and Spanish data protection authorities  —  Apple is breaking EU law …
Hartley Charlton / MacRumors:
A large number of mostly late 2013 and mid 2014 MacBook Pro users are reporting that upgrading to macOS Big Sur is bricking their computers  —  A large number of late 2013 and mid 2014 13-inch MacBook Pro owners are reporting that the macOS Big Sur update is bricking their machines.
Jean-Louis Gassée / Monday Note:
Joseph Cox / VICE:
Investigation: US military buys granular movement data of people around the world from a wide array of apps for Muslim dating, prayer, Craigslist, weather, more  —  A Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Apple Podcasts now lets anyone create an embeddable web player for shows or individual episodes  —  Apple is making it easier to discover and listen to podcasts via the web.  The company announced today an Apple Podcasts embed web player is now available, allowing anyone — including creators …
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Airbnb releases public IPO filing, seeks Nasdaq listing under ticker ABNB, reports $219M in net income on revenues of $1.3B last quarter, down nearly 19% YoY  —  - Airbnb has released its prospectus to debut on public markets.  —  Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Zoom unveils At-Risk Meeting Notifier, a feature that scans the net for posted Zoom meeting links and alerts meeting organizers to potential Zoombombing attacks  —  The new “At-Risk Meeting Notifier” Zoom feature scans the internet and alerts conference organizers when a link to their Zoom meeting has been posted online.
BuzzFeed News:
Sources: Facebook's 3rd-party content mods were never instructed to enforce its “call to arms policy” from 2019, meant to prevent real-world armed intimidation  —  “What we learned after Kenosha is that Facebook's call to arms policy didn't just fail.  It was never designed to function properly in the first place."
Todd Spangler / Variety:
WarnerMedia says HBO Max will be available on Amazon Fire devices from November 17  —  The HBO Max app for Amazon's devices will be available Tuesday, Nov. 17.  The launch will bring WarnerMedia's flagship direct-to-consumer product to Amazon's estimated 40 million-plus active Fire TV users …
Gary Ng / iPhone in Canada Blog:
Apple responds to privacy concerns over checking macOS apps' Developer ID certs over OCSP, ceases logging IP addresses, will launch encrypted protocol in 2021  —  Following privacy concerns from Mac users after Apple's Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) server went down …
BuzzFeed News:
Internal Facebook data shows that labels on Trump's election misinformation posts only decreased shares by ~8%, and failed to slow their spread across the site  —  Internal data shows that labels on President Trump's posts decrease reshares by about 8%.  They still account for some of the most engaging posts on the platform.
Bloomberg:
Sources: DataRobot, which helps companies train and deploy ML models, is in talks to raise ~$300M at a valuation of $2.5B+, bringing its total raised to $700M+  —  - Funding round includes Altimeter, Silver Lake and T. Rowe  — Boston-based company has raised more than $700 million to date

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More News

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:

Earlier Picks

Frank McShan / MacRumors: