Techmeme
January 18, 2021, 7:15 PM

Top News

Los Angeles Times:
Amateur digital sleuths have joined massive crowdsourcing efforts on social media to track violent Capitol rioters, passing the evidence to authorities  —  The digital sleuths take to their computers in the moments when they can peel away from their real-world responsibilities — jobs …
Sohee Kim / Bloomberg:
Samsung Electronics heir Jay Y. Lee was sentenced to 30 months in prison over bribery charges; Lee still faces a second prosecution related to succession  —  - Lee sentenced to two and a half years in jail after court case  — Samsung succession scandal has rocked South Korea for years
Joanna Stern / Wall Street Journal:
Social media algorithms amplify the reach of incendiary, misinformation-filled conspiracy theories, and users have no control over them  —  What you see in your feeds isn't up to you.  What's at stake is no longer just missing a birthday.  It's your sanity—and world peace.
Joan Donovan / HBR.org:
Zoe Schiffer / The Verge:
GitHub apologizes to the employee it fired for using the term “Nazis” on January 6, offers him his job back, and 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.
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 …
Sebastian Sinclair / CoinDesk:
Maps.me, an offline mobile map for travelers, raises $50M in a funding round led by Alameda Research, aims to launch “yield earning” DeFi tools inside the app  —  The funding will go toward the launch of a multi-currency wallet on Maps.me, enabling decentralized finance (DeFi) features for 140 million users.
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.
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch:
proSapient, a research service helping customers gather insights from experts via interviews and surveys, raises $10M Series A led by Smedvig Capital  —  For several years there has been talk about how to leverage ‘experts’ online.  How do you ‘suck their brains’ for information in an efficient manner …

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Featured Podcasts

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Sundar Pichai on Gemini 4 and the AI compute crunch
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Earlier Picks

New York Times:
Miriam Berger / Washington Post: