Techmeme
January 23, 2021, 10:05 AM

Top News

Sam Byford / The Verge:
Microsoft backtracks on price hike for Xbox Live Gold subscriptions announced Friday and says free-to-play games will also no longer require a Gold subscription  —  Free-to-play games will also no longer require a Gold subscription  —  Microsoft has reversed its controversial Xbox Live price increase.
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Microsoft president Brad Smith defended the company's political contributions in a meeting with employees after some questioned donations from its PAC  —  - Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said the company needs the Microsoft Political Action Committee.  — The company is looking …
Charlie Savage / New York Times:
Unclassified memo: Defense Intelligence Agency analysts have used commercial databases of location data from smartphone apps to track Americans without warrants  —  The disclosure comes amid growing legislative scrutiny of how the government uses commercially available location records.
USA Today:
Facebook says a configuration change has caused some users to be logged out of their apps and is working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible  —  “Why am I logged out of Facebook?”  The question ricocheted around the internet as an untold number of people across …
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Ex-ADT technician pled guilty to computer fraud and invasive visual recording for viewing home security camera feeds he installed in ~200 homes over 9,000 times  —  Employee for ADT accessed ~200 customer cams on more than 9,600 occasions.  —  A home security technician has admitted …
Mary Ann Azevedo / FinLedger:
Interview with Chase CIO Rohan Amin on managing Chase's $4B tech budget, API integrations, and this year's rise in digital mortgage applications and banking  —  Chase CIO shares what the firm learned through the pandemic as well as his views on APIs, working with startups & the future of retail banking
William Boston / Wall Street Journal:
Todd Spangler / Variety:
MoffettNathanson survey: 62% of Apple TV+ subscribers were on free offers in Q4 2020, only 30% said they plan to renew at the regular $4.99/month price  —  Apple has said it wants to bulk up revenue from services — including Apple TV Plus, which is just over one year old.
Steven Levy / Wired:
Alphabet says that it is shutting down Loon, its internet balloon project, calling it “a successful experiment” but not a viable one  —  Plus: The moonshot's launch, health care for the mask-less, and a new era's inaugural meme.  —  DO you detect something missing?
Dara Kerr / CNET:
Will Knight / Wired:
A look at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, a government-sponsored research lab, and its work on a new language model similar to GPT-3  —  China produces as many artificial intelligence researchers as the US, but it lags in key fields like machine learning.  The government hopes to make up ground.
Eric Newcomer / Newcomer:
Sources: data analytics service Databricks is in talks to raise a private funding round, potentially valuing it at ~$27B; Databricks was valued at $6.2B in 2019  —  The Andreessen Horowitz and NEA-backed company is raising a private round.  —  Databricks — a data and AI platform …

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Earlier Picks

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