Techmeme
January 18, 2021, 5:40 AM

Top News

Zoe Schiffer / The Verge:
GitHub apologizes to the employee it has fired for using the term “Nazis” on Jan. 6 and offers him his job back, says the company's head of HR has resigned  —  The company is offering the employee his job back  —  GitHub is admitting that a Jewish employee was fired in error and is offering him his job back.
New York Times:
A look at the incentives, like guaranteed auction win percentages, that Facebook got from Google in the ad partnership that is now a focus of an antitrust suit  —  Facebook was going to compete with Google for some advertising sales but backed away from the plan after the companies cut a preferential deal, according to court documents.
Reuters:
Sources: in a flurry of parting actions against China, Trump's admin has notified Huawei suppliers including Intel that it's revoking licenses to sell to Huawei  —  NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration notified Huawei suppliers, including chipmaker Intel …
Medium:
A look at the shady aspects of Tether, the stablecoin being probed by SDNY for over a year, widely used to buy BTC and other cryptocurrencies on many exchanges  —  This is the story of a Bitcoin trade — the most financially impactful trade I've ever made in my life.
Washington Post:
Dating apps like Tinder and Bumble are banning users identified in photos from the Capitol riot, and some users are relaying incriminating evidence to the FBI  —  Bumble, Tinder and others are freezing out rioters with help from law enforcement — and, in some cases, their own photos.
Issie Lapowsky / Protocol:
Will Knight / Wired:
A Harvard medical student used OpenAI's GPT-2 to submit comments on Idaho's Medicaid draft proposal; volunteers couldn't tell them apart from those by humans  —  A Harvard medical student submitted auto-generated comments to Medicaid; volunteers couldn't distinguish them from those penned by humans.
More: Input
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
DuckDuckGo surpassed 100M daily search queries for the first time on Jan. 11; since August 2020, the search engine began seeing over 2B search queries per month  —  DuckDuckGo reaches historic milestone in a week when both Signal and Telegram saw a huge influx of new users.
Benedict Evans:
Social platforms are neither communication services nor publishers, and society will have to evolve new norms to regulate speech on them  —  What mattered in tech this week?  —  Once a week, I send a newsletter to 150k people - what happened in tech that actually mattered, and what it means.
FinSMEs:
Frankfurt, Germany-based CLARK, which searches for the best insurance rates for its users, raises €69M Series C led by Tencent  —  Clark, a Frankfurt, Germany-based digital insurance manager, raised €69m in Series ​C funding.  —  The round was led by Tencent with participation …

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More News

Alex Danco:
Miriam Berger / Washington Post:

Earlier Picks

Lucas Matney / TechCrunch:
Heather Knight / San Francisco Chronicle:
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg: