Techmeme
December 25, 2020, 3:55 PM

Top News

Lorraine Longhi / The Copper Courier:
Some GoDaddy employees are upset after the company sent a phishing email scam to test its employees, with the email promising a $650 one-time holiday bonus  —  GoDaddy surpassed 20 million customers this year and laid off or reassigned hundreds of employees during the coronavirus pandemic in Arizona, Iowa, and Texas.
Nicole Sperling / New York Times:
As streaming platforms like Netflix have grown, political films they used to seek out, like The Dissident, on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, are being shunned  —  Bryan Fogel's examination of the killing of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi had trouble finding a home among the companies …
Dipayan Ghosh / Wired:
Facebook's claims that SMBs will suffer from iOS's privacy changes seem exaggerated when examining the technical changes Facebook announced in response  —  The social media giant would have you believe that Apple's privacy update will hurt the little guys.  But Facebook's motives aren't so altruistic.
Yuan Yang / Financial Times:
European tech executives and diplomats privately complain US sanctions on Huawei shut them out of the Chinese market while offering exceptions for US companies  —  Business says EU groups are losing out on licences to sell to blacklisted Chinese companies  —  European tech executives …
Sam Biddle / The Intercept:
In unsealed court docs, Facebook managers appeared to admit to major flaws in ad targeting capabilities in 2016 and wondered if they were misleading advertisers  —  Facebook is currently waging a PR campaign purporting to show that Apple is seriously injuring American small businesses through its iOS privacy features.
Sara Morrison / Vox:
Privacy laws in the US had momentum at the beginning of 2020, but the pandemic has focused Congress elsewhere and forced everyone to give up more data online  —  Our lives moved online in 2020.  Too bad privacy laws didn't.  —  SHARE All sharing options  —  As a digital privacy reporter …
Gene Park / Washington Post:
Interview with Microsoft's VP of gaming ecosystem Sarah Bond, a former T-Mobile executive, on lowering entry barriers by selling Xbox as a subscription  —  The launch of the new series of Xbox consoles is actually unlike any other console launch in the industry's history …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Citrix confirmed ADC networking equipment is being actively exploited to amplify DDoS attacks against a “small number of customers”; patch expected mid-January  —  Citrix says it's working on a fix, expected next year.  —  Threat actors have discovered a way to bounce …
Washington Post:
A study using 96K searches found that Google News put far more national news outlets than local outlets at the top of search results, even for local queries  —  Our audit reveals that Google News sends readers — and advertising dollars — away from local news outlets.

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Nicole Carpenter / Polygon:

Earlier Picks

Eric Newcomer / Newcomer:
Financial Times: