Techmeme
August 8, 2021, 6:40 PM

Top News

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
An overview of Apple's three new “Child Safety” initiatives, what critics are getting wrong, and the completely legitimate slippery slope concerns from experts  —  Apple yesterday announced three new “Child Safety” initiatives: … (CSAM stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material —  a.k.a. child pornography.
Alex Stamos / @alexstamos:
[Thread] Apple's child safety protections announcement hurt the effort to find a policy balance on safety and privacy aspects of e2e encrypted comms products  —  The chatter around Apple's recent announcement of new child safety protections is rather frustrating, as the amplification/knowledge ratio seems rather high on this one. Apple's docs: https://www.apple.com/... A discussion with friends: https://twitter.com/...
Apple Privacy Letter:
More than 4,000 individuals and organizations sign an open letter asking Apple to halt the implementation of its proposed content monitoring technology  —  Security & Privacy Experts, Cryptographers, Researchers, Professors, Legal Experts and Apple Consumers Decry Apple's Planned Move …
Will Cathcart / @wcathcart:
[Thread] WhatsApp says Apple's approach to CSAM is a setback to user privacy, will be more fraught outside the US; WhatsApp flagged 400K+ cases to NCMEC in 2020  —  I read the information Apple put out yesterday and I'm concerned. I think this is the wrong approach and a setback for people's privacy all over the world. People have asked if we'll adopt this system for WhatsApp. The answer is no.
Washington Post:
How the cryptocurrency industry gained influence in Washington and became one of the biggest stumbling blocks holding up the passage of the infrastructure bill  —  The infrastructure bill is in part stalled as negotiations proceed on how closely to regulate the crypto industry
Ankush Das / It's FOSS News:
Firefox for Desktop lost ~46M MAUs, dropping from ~244M MAUs in Dec. 2018 to ~198M MAUs in July 2021, as users moved to Chrome and Chromium-based browsers  —  Mozilla's Firefox is losing users big time since 2018, why are users moving away from it?  Is this something to be worried about?
Reuters:
China sues Tencent, claiming WeChat's “youth mode” does not comply with the country's laws protecting minors  —  Beijing prosecutors initiated a civil public-interest lawsuit against a Tencent (0700.HK) subsidiary on Friday, saying the “youth mode” on the company's popular social …
Bloomberg:
Despite claims of diversity and inclusion, Asian Americans in Silicon Valley still face racism and are least likely to break into leadership positions  —  Tech companies love to crow about diversity and inclusion.  Workers see a racist “bait and switch.”  —  Silicon Valley executives sometimes seem …
Olivia Solon / NBC News:
Call center operator Teleperformance, which counts Apple, Amazon, and Uber as clients, wants to monitor staff working from home in Colombia, via AI-powered cams  —  Colombia-based call center workers who provide outsourced customer service to some of the nation's largest companies …
Stephen O'Grady / Redmonk:
Redmonk study of programming languages, combining GitHub and Stack Overflow data, shows Java in second place alongside Python, while JavaScript remains top  —  While we generally try to have our rankings in July immediately after they are run, we generally operate these on a better late than never basis.

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Earlier Picks

Naomi Nix / Bloomberg: