Techmeme
August 24, 2021, 6:15 AM

Top News

Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Instagram says it is retiring the swipe-up link feature, which lets users visit external links by swiping up, in favor of tappable stickers, starting August 30  —  The swipe-up will be no more.  Instagram is planning to retire the feature, which allows people to visit external webpages by swiping up …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, and Andy Jassy plan to attend a meeting with Joe Biden on Wednesday to discuss efforts to improve cybersecurity  —  Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella plan to attend a White House meeting with President Joe Biden …
Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
Researchers find 1,000+ web apps, from Ford, American Airlines, and others, mistakenly exposed 38M records stored on Microsoft's Power Apps service  —  Misconfigured Power Apps from Microsoft led to more than a thousand web apps accessible to anyone who found them.
Igor Bonifacic / Engadget:
Poly Network says it has now recovered all of $610M in cryptocurrencies it lost to a hacker, and is in the process of returning them to their rightful owners  —  One of the most unusual cryptocurrency heists in recent memory has come to a close.  On Monday, Poly Network …
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Facebook is running a test in the US to bring voice and video calling back to the main Facebook app, to reduce the need to jump between Facebook and Messenger  —  - New test will bring Messenger technology back into Facebook  —  Facebook Inc. is bringing voice and video calling …
Turner Wright / Cointelegraph:
Substack begins accepting bitcoin as payment for subscriptions, initially for a few crypto publications, using payments processor OpenNode  —  Substack has more than 500,000 paid subscribers, but Bitcoin payments will first be available to “a select group of crypto-focused publications.”
Android Developers Blog:
Google says it will make app ratings on the Play Store more personalized by localizing by users' country from November 2021 and device type from early 2022  —  Ratings and reviews are important.  They provide valuable quantitative and qualitative feedback on your users' reported experience …
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
After criticism, Centre, the consortium founded by Circle and Coinbase, says it will exclusively back its USDC stablecoin reserves with cash and US treasuries  —  - Digital currency company Circle says it's changing the makeup of its dollar-pegged stablecoin USD Coin to just cash and U.S. Treasury bonds.
Varsha Bansal / Rest of World:
A look at the decade long struggle to bring the script of Tulu, an Indian language, into Unicode, and the problem of keeping languages alive in the digital age  —  For 10 years, experts have tried to bring Tulu to smartphones.  But they can't agree on how.  —  • BENGALURU, INDIA
Reuters:
Report: Didi has suspended plans to launch in the UK and Europe for at least a year, amid a regulatory backlash in China over data privacy  —  China's ride-hailing giant Didi Global Inc (DIDI.N) has suspended its plans to launch in Britain and continental Europe, The Telegraph reported on Monday …
Gillian Tan / Bloomberg:
Nigerian mobile payments service OPay raises $400M led by Vision Fund 2 at a $2B valuation, marking SoftBank's first investment in Africa  —  - Sequoia Capital China and Redpoint China also participated  — Investment marks Vision Fund 2's first bet in Africa
Patrick Klepek / VICE:
Sources detail Unity's GovTech division, which contracts with governments and militaries, as some staff complain about the lack of transparency around such work  —  The lack of transparency around the game engine maker's “GovTech” work, which contracts with the Department of Defense, has concerned employees.
New York Times:
Apple and Google call on the White House to oppose a South Korean bill, set to face a vote this week, that would mandate multiple payment systems for IAPs  —  A proposal in the South Korean legislature is an early test of how forcefully the Biden administration will defend the companies abroad while trying to trim their power at home.

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More News

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Reuters:
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Earlier Picks

Ben Lovejoy / 9to5Mac:
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Sami Fathi / MacRumors: