Techmeme
March 28, 2021, 5:10 PM

Top News

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 …
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 …
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 …
Daisuke Wakabayashi / New York Times:
A look at Google's two-decade quest to compete with Amazon, as it now tries to present itself as a cheaper and less restrictive option for independent sellers  —  Google presents itself to independent sellers as cheaper and less restrictive.  But it is not clear whether it can change people's habits of going straight to Amazon.
Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal:
As Moore's Law slows down, a look at 2D materials like graphene, which is already being used to create flexible electronics and could replace silicon in chips  —  After more than a half-century of making microchips in more or less the same way, profound changes are coming  —  Silicon is pretty great.
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
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Q&A with NYT's Kevin Roose on his new book Futureproof, how robotic process automation might replace some white-collar jobs, Microsoft Excel TikTok, and more  —  As the editor-in-chief of The Verge, I can theoretically assign whatever I want.  However, there is one topic I have failed …
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.
Liam Tung / ZDNet:
Microsoft says 92% of vulnerable Exchange servers have 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.

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Earlier Picks

Abby Ohlheiser / MIT Technology Review:
Roland Li / San Francisco Chronicle:
Wayne Ma / The Information: