Techmeme
December 21, 2020, 1:30 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Analysis finds 24+ organizations that installed SolarWinds code, including Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, VMware, Belkin, a CA hospital, and Kent State university  —  A Wall Street Journal analysis identified at least 24 organizations that installed software laced with malicious code by Russian hackers
Daisuke Wakabayashi / New York Times:
Profile of Dina Srinivasan, who is helping Texas AG's antitrust investigation of Google after her treatises on Facebook and Google reframed antitrust thinking  —  Regulators are relying on insiders like Dina Srinivasan, who left her digital ad job after concluding that “Facebook and Google …
Andrés Arrieta / Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Matt Stoller / BIG:
Margaret Harding McGill / Axios:
Congress' COVID-19 relief deal includes $7B in broadband funding, with $1.9B to remove Huawei and ZTE equipment, $3.2B to low-income families, and more  —  The coronavirus relief package deal that Congressional leaders reached Sunday includes $7 billion in funding for broadband internet access.
The Citizen Lab:
Citizen Lab: NSO's zero-day, zero-click exploit chain, active in at least iOS 13.5.1, was used to hack ~36 Al Jazeera reporters via iMessage in summer of 2020  —  Summary & Key Findings  — In July and August 2020, government operatives used NSO Group's Pegasus spyware …
Sam Biddle / The Intercept:
Despite complaints from pro-democracy activists and celebrities in Vietnam, Facebook allows groups focused on harassing dissidents and getting them arrested  —  For the past two years, Do Nguyen Mai Khoi has been trying painfully, futilely, to get Facebook to care about Vietnam.
Zach Dorfman / Foreign Policy:
Interviews with 36+ current and former US officials describe China's strategy of analyzing vast quantities of stolen US personal data to identify CIA operatives  —  Around 2013, U.S. intelligence began noticing an alarming pattern: Undercover CIA personnel, flying into countries in Africa …
Aislinn Keely / The Block:
Personal information of 270K+ customers of hardware wallet Ledger has been leaked online, including emails, home addresses, and phone numbers  —  A database containing the personal information of over 270,000 Ledger customers has been published on RaidForums, a marketplace for buying, selling, and sharing hacked information.
Cecilia D'Anastasio / Wired:
Cyberpunk 2077's developer hamstrung reviewers by forcing NDAs and sending copies just days before launch to prevent players from seeing the buggy mess  —  Video game companies are increasingly putting restrictions on what reviewers can show, widening the gap between expectations and reality.
The Economic Times:
Pine Labs, which makes POS software and provides last-mile retail transaction tech for merchants, raises $75M-$100M at a $2B valuation  —  Pine Labs is currently India's third largest fintech startup after Paytm and PhonePe.  It counts Lone Pine Capital, Sequoia India, Temasek, Mastercard, Paypal and Actis LLP as among its investors.

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Featured Podcasts

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Cliff Sosin - Owning the Complements to Intelligence
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Fired OpenAI Safety Researchers Speak Out + We Look Inside Pandora's Box
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Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
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More News

Pranshu Verma / New York Times:
Nico Grant / Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

Rene Ebersole / National Geographic:
Owen Thomas / San Francisco Chronicle:
Dan Primack / Axios:
Michael Steeber / 9to5Mac:
Katie Bo Williams / Defense One: