Techmeme
December 27, 2020, 10:10 AM

Top News

Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple's system status webpage indicates that the company has resolved an outage affecting iCloud Account and Sign In services  —  Apple's system status webpage indicates that the company has resolved an outage affecting “iCloud Account and Sign In” services.
Steven Overly / Politico:
Facebook critics say a general animosity toward Facebook in Washington may push the Biden administration into taking more proactive measures against the company  —  Facebook endured a deluge of political scrutiny in Donald Trump's Washington.  It's poised to face even worse in the Joe Biden era.
Julia Alexander / The Verge:
2020 has been the beginning of major streaming exclusivity plays, forcing users to pay for four or five services as big studios prioritize their own platforms  —  End-of-year turnover is always rough, and it's going to get worse  —  Two of the biggest movies people want to talk about this week …
Lars Eidnes / ITNEXT:
Analysis of the top 1M pages on the web finds that HTTP/2 is now more common than HTTP/1.1; jQuery, Google Analytics were the top JavaScript libraries by usage  —  We rendered the top 1 million pages on the web, tracking every conceivable performance metric, logging every error, noting every requested URL.
New York Times:
Beijing's frenzied drive to free itself from a reliance on imported chips could prove to be one of the enduring legacies of Trump's trade policies toward China  —  Beijing's drive to free itself from reliance on imported semiconductors has lifted start-ups and big firms alike.  Some have flamed out.
Will Knight / Wired:
David Silver, a principal research scientist at DeepMind, on AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and MuZero, applying reinforcement learning to real world problems, and more  —  David Silver of DeepMind, who helped create the program that defeated a Go champion, thinks rewards are central to how machines—and humans—acquire knowledge.
Sarah Fallon / Wired:
Profile of Ray Holt, who in the 1960s jointly developed the F-14 Tomcat's Central Air Data Computer, considered by some to be the first microprocessor  —  In a weird way, I've known Ray Holt all my life, but I never knew what he had accomplished—or how his inventions wove their way into my own family.

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