Techmeme
July 31, 2021, 5:10 AM

Top News

Stephanie Bodoni / Bloomberg:
In a filing, Amazon disclosed EU privacy regulators fined the company a record $888M for violating GDPR data storage rules in a July 16 decision  —  - Luxembourg watchdog wields new powers with highest data fine  — Fine follows probe based on complaint by French privacy group
Amazon.com, Inc.:
Natalie Wolchover / Quanta Magazine:
Physicists say they used Google's quantum computer to demo a time crystal, which forever cycles between states without consuming energy, for the first time  —  Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy.
Russ Mitchell / Los Angeles Times:
New book claims Elon Musk demanded to be made Apple CEO during Tesla buyout talks in 2016, before Tim Cook cursed and hung up; Musk says he never spoke to Cook  —  Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century  —  If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission …
Dan Wang / Foreign Affairs:
How US sanctions forced Chinese companies to develop key tech themselves, aligning the companies' incentives with China's goal of economic self-sufficiency  —  In 2016, AlphaGo, a computer program developed by machine learning experts in London, beat the world's top players of the classical Chinese board game Go.
Reuters:
Stephen Shankland / CNET:
Twitter offers bug bounty of up to $3,500 to spot bias in its photo cropping algorithm, which was shown to favor white people over Black people  —  Twitter has a new way to rid itself of artificial intelligence bias: pay outsiders to help it find problems.  On Friday, the short-message app …
Tim Perry / HTTP Toolkit:
Safari's extremely slow pace in adopting popular features and fixing showstopping bugs, and refusal to engage with contentious API proposals, is harming the web  —  There's been a lot of discussion recently about how “Safari is the new IE” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).  —  I don't want to rehash …
Nicholas Megaw / Financial Times:
Digital bank Monzo reveals a loss of £130M on £66M revenue for the year ended Feb. and says UK FCA is investigating it over potential money laundering breaches  —  Digital lender suffers second ‘going concern’ warning from auditors  —  The Financial Conduct Authority …
Brian Merchant / VICE:
Metaverse, as Zuckerberg and others imagine, is an odd vision built from a compendium of juvenile fantasies, perceived market opportunities, and overt dystopias  —  Silicon Valley CEOs keep hailing its imminent arrival as they hawk digital goods, but the metaverse was a dystopian idea from its inception.
Paul Smith / Australian Financial Review:
Australia-based IntelligenceBank, a marketing software provider for brands, raises $37M from Five Elms Capital to help speed up its expansion in the US  —  IntelligenceBank, a Melbourne-based marketing operations platform that counts ANZ Bank, National Australia Bank, Suncorp, Bupa, KFC …
Eric Seufert / @eric_seufert:
[Thread] Facebook's future prospects remain strong as the secular rise of digital advertising blunts any headwinds from regulators, Apple, critics, and others  —  My takeaway from $FB earnings: Facebook will inevitably become the most important company in the lives of most people on Earth for the next 20-30 years. I don't see any credible, extant mechanism that can constrain its growth (1/X)
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
A look at Intel's dismal 2020, which saw the delay of its 7nm architecture, Apple's switch to Arm-based chips, and the departure of Jim Keller and other execs  —  In the summer of 2020 Intel seemed poised for triumph.  Then it all went wrong.  “To put it briefly: Intel blew it,” …

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Earlier Picks

Greg Ip / Wall Street Journal:
Davey Alba / New York Times:
Tom Wilson / Reuters:
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Kieran Leavitt / Toronto Star: