Techmeme
March 27, 2021, 8:50 PM

Top News

Nick Statt / The Verge:
Amazon is pursuing an increasingly aggressive PR strategy, picking fights with Democratic politicians such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on Twitter  —  Who is Amazon trying to convince?  —  Amazon is intensifying its bizarre online public relations strategy of picking increasingly petty …
Ken Klippenstein / The Intercept:
USA Today:
NY State launches first US “vaccine passport” app, Excelsior Pass, built on IBM's blockchain-based health pass platform, to be used initially at large venues  —  Starting Friday, New Yorkers will be able to pull up a code on their cell phone or a printout to prove they've …
Jeff John Roberts / Decrypt:
Inside BitClout, the controversial service that tokenizes Twitter personalities, mostly without permission, and has $170M worth of BTC raised from a16z, others  —  Diamondhands greets me on the encrypted messaging app Signal.  He can see me over video, but his own video is turned off …
Liam Tung / ZDNet:
Microsoft says 92% of vulnerable Exchange servers had been patched/mitigated, and reiterates that patches do not necessarily remove the access of the attacker  —  If you're cleaning up a infected Exchange server, you need to look for traces of multiple threats, warns Microsoft.
Krystal Hu / Reuters:
Report: close to half the tech M&A deals in the US included a stock consideration in 2020, the highest percentage since 2016, versus only 27% in 2019  —  (Reuters) - Cash may be king, but stock is queen in the land of technology mergers and acquisitions during a pandemic-fueled tech boom.
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Apple releases iOS 14.4.2 and iOS 12.5.2 to fix a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability in WebKit that “may have been actively exploited”  —  Apple today released iOS 14.4.2 for iPhone and iPad, and watchOS 7.3.3 for Apple Watch.  The updates includes an important security fix for WebKit …
Wall Street Journal:
Interviews and documents reveal that in the year before his death, Tony Hsieh was surrounded by people who lived off his fortune and enabled his risky lifestyle  —  The group that surrounded the late Zappos boss helped sustain his drug habit, protected him from outsiders and lived off his largess
Reggie Ugwu / New York Times:
A look at Google's hands-off content moderation approach for Google Podcasts, where hate speech from white supremacists and pro-Nazi groups is easy to find  —  The platform's tolerance of white supremacist, pro-Nazi and conspiracy theory content pushes the boundaries of the medium.
Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg:
Report: Southeast Asian tech startups raised $8.2B in 2020, down 3.5% YoY, compared to a 31% drop in India and 38% in Africa; Indonesia drew 70% of the capital  —  - Fundraising remained at 2019 levels even as pandemic raged  — Indonesian startups drew 70% of region's investments last year

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Featured Podcasts

The Upstarts Podcast:
Blitzy's Brian Elliott: Cursor And Claude Code Are Looking At Your Enterprise Code 'Through A Straw'
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OpenAI's Plan To Merge Chat And Agents — With Greg Brockman
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More News

Abby Ohlheiser / MIT Technology Review:
Alex Konrad / Forbes:
Roland Li / San Francisco Chronicle:

Earlier Picks

Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Riley de León / CNBC:
Insider:
Maureen Farrell / Wall Street Journal:
Makena Kelly / The Verge: