Techmeme
December 21, 2020, 12:35 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:
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 …
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.
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 …
Nandita Bose / Reuters:
Sources: executives and employees at Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and others are seeking to place allies in senior roles at government agencies under Biden  —  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Silicon Valley is working behind the scenes to secure senior roles for tech allies in lesser-known …
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.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
TikTok launches its first personalized annual recap feature, “Year on TikTok”, which highlights what sort of videos were watched the most, favorite tracks, more  —  Spotify users have Wrapped and Instagram users have their Top 9.  And now TikTok users will have their own year-in-review feature, too.
More: TikTok and 9to5Mac
Isabel Woodford / Sifted:
Study: the number of neobanks worldwide has tripled since 2017, climbing to nearly 300; in 2019, more than 70 neobanks went live  —  The number of neobanks worldwide has tripled since 2017, climbing from 100 to nearly 300 worldwide.  —  That means, over the last three years …
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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Grit:
The Pull to Build: Joubin Mirzadegan on Grit and Starting Roadrunner
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Hard Fork:
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More News

Pranshu Verma / New York Times:
Nico Grant / Bloomberg:
Rene Ebersole / National Geographic:

Earlier Picks

Owen Thomas / San Francisco Chronicle:
Lingling Wei / Wall Street Journal:
Michael Steeber / 9to5Mac:
Katie Bo Williams / Defense One: