Techmeme
February 22, 2021, 7:10 AM

Top News

BuzzFeed News:
Sources: Zuckerberg's personal intervention to reduce the severity of Alex Jones' ban in 2019 slowed down Facebook's efforts to deal with dangerous content  —  In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet's most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones.
Bloomberg:
Clubhouse says it has added security safeguards and banned a user after some Clubhouse audio and metadata was found on a third-party website  —  - The app's creators had been warned user data was vulnerable  — An unidentified user streamed audio chats to their own website
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Researchers discover macOS malware dubbed “Silver Sparrow” on at least 30K Macs, which includes a native M1 version and leverages the Installer JavaScript API  —  With no payload, analysts are struggling to learn what this mature malware does.  —  A previously undetected piece …
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
WhatsApp says users who haven't accepted its new privacy policy by May 15 can receive calls and notifications “for a short time”, but not read or send messages  —  WhatsApp said earlier this week that it will allow users to review its planned privacy update at “their own pace” …
Ashlee Vance / Bloomberg:
Profile of Youyang Gu, a 27-year-old data scientist whose ML model most accurately predicted COVID-19 death totals, which the CDC put on its forecasting website  —  Spring 2020 brought with it the arrival of the celebrity statistical model.  As the public tried to gauge how big a deal …
Ben Smith / New York Times:
Russian investigative journalism is flourishing alongside “probiv”, the buying of data on phone calls, cell location, or air travel off Telegram or the dark web  —  A new wave of news outlets has used conventional, and unconventional, methods to pierce the veil of Putin's power.
David Uberti / Wall Street Journal:
Accellion's file transfer software hack, which affected Jones Day, also impacted New Zealand's central bank, 1M unemployment benefits applicants in WA, and more  —  Like the SolarWinds breach, the incident highlights supply-chain vulnerabilities  —  The hack of software provider Accellion USA LLC …
Reuters:
China finalizes rules on banks' internet loan businesses, affecting Alibaba and others, setting new capital requirements, must be complied with by July 17, 2022  —  SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China's bank regulator on Saturday tightened requirements on the internet loan business of commercial banks …
Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal:
For many services, moderating content has become an existential crisis; some services are even establishing rules that pre-empt the need for costly moderation  —  Content moderation rules used to be a question of taste.  Now, they can determine a service's prospects for survival.
Sheldon Chanel / The Guardian:
Facebook's Australia ban is acute for people in places like Fiji, who rely on phone plans with cheap Facebook access as going to news websites costs more data  —  Media experts fear that communities reliant on the site for information will suffer significant impact
Politico:
EU, with <10% of global chip production, has had its industries hit hard by chip shortages and is seeking “strategic autonomy” via new fabs and alliances  —  Europe wants no part of a new Cold War and is seeking its own chip champions to avoid getting drawn in.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Automate your scheduling workflows with Zoho Calendar  —  Your calendar can do more than schedule meetings Creating a calendar event takes only a few seconds.  But scheduling is rarely just about creating the event.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Grit:
Inside the AI Startup Making Customer Support 65% Cheaper
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord's product chief | Peter Sellis
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
AI Doom Backlash Arrives, Anthropic & OpenAI IPO Outlook, Frontier Business Momentum Slows
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Invest Like the Best:
Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Sources:
Baseten's CEO on why every company will want to own its AI
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:10 AM ET, February 22, 2021.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Rich Mogull / TidBITS:
Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch:

Earlier Picks

Reuters:
Erika Hayasaki / New York Times:
Chris Welch / The Verge: