Techmeme
December 14, 2020, 2:20 PM

Top News

Dustin Volz / Wall Street Journal:
Source: Treasury's hackers used a flaw in a SolarWinds product; SolarWinds, which touts 300K+ customers, says the flaw was the result of a “supply chain attack”  —  Russia's foreign intelligence service is suspected of being behind effort to breach government networks
Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:
Christopher Bing / Reuters:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Google says Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, and other Google services suffered a worldwide outage for about an hour for a majority of users on Monday  —  Update: It looks like services are slowly starting to come back again.  We've contacted Google for a statement about what happened.
Nicole Nguyen / Wall Street Journal:
Review of Apple's Fitness+ subscription service: a relatively good deal compared to rivals, with plenty of workouts, but requiring a Watch might put people off  —  The $10-a-month app takes on at-home fitness for a competitive price but with an expensive catch
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Apple releases iOS 14.3 and macOS Big Sur 11.1 and launches its app privacy labels across all of its App Stores  —  At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June, the company announced it would soon require developers to disclose their app's privacy practices to customers via new …
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Samantha Cole / VICE:
Pornhub says it has removed all videos from unverified accounts from its platform; the number of hosted videos dropped from 13.5M to 7.2M  —  After changing its policies to ban unverified uploaders and Mastercard and Visa's decision to drop the platform entirely, Pornhub announced that it has removed all unverified videos.
Daisuke Wakabayashi / New York Times:
Internal memo: Google now plans to have employees return to office in September 2021 and is testing a flexible model of three days in office, two days WFH  —  The Silicon Valley company now plans to have employees return to the office in September.  It will be different when they get there.
Upvoted:
Reddit announces it has acquired short-form video app and TikTok rival Dubsmash  —  Reddit is where passionate communities come together for authentic exchanges about the topics that matter to them.  Video is increasingly core to how people want to connect, and as we continue to grow our community …
Edward Ludlow / Bloomberg:
Amazon's Zoox unveils an autonomous electric robotaxi that can hold four passengers and run for a claimed 16 hours on a single charge, with a launch date TBC  —  - Vehicle seats four and can run for 16 hours before recharging  — CEO says Zoox may eventually build package delivery vehicles
New York Times:
In H1 2020, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft spent ~$23M on EU lobbying, equal to what they declared for all of 2019 and up from ~$8.3M in 2014  —  Silicon Valley is building a powerful influence industry in Brussels, which has “never seen this kind of money” spent this way.
Politico:
Ben Smith / New York Times:
Sources: Apple TV+ was making Scraper, a show about Gawker Media, with several episodes written, then Tim Cook sent an email about it and the project was killed  —  Big tech companies now exert huge influence over what stories get told.  The message is clear: Be careful who you offend.
Ashley Gold / Axios:
Source: FTC is launching a new inquiry into the privacy and data collection practices of Amazon, TikTok, Facebook and WhatsApp, Twitter, YouTube, and others  —  The Federal Trade Commission will announce Monday that it's launching a new inquiry into the privacy and data collection practices …

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Earlier Picks

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