Techmeme
August 23, 2021, 3:55 PM

Top News

Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
Researchers find 1K+ 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.
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
After criticism, Centre, the consortium founded by Circle and Coinbase, says its stablecoin USDC will now back reserves with only 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.
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
A bug in Razer's Synapse software, which Windows fetches and installs when a Razer accessory is plugged in, lets anyone with a Razer mouse gain admin privileges  —  A Razer Synapse zero-day vulnerability has been disclosed on Twitter, allowing you to gain Windows admin privileges simply by plugging in a Razer mouse or keyboard.
Ben Lovejoy / 9to5Mac:
Apple confirms it has been scanning iCloud Mail for CSAM since 2019 but has not been scanning iCloud Photos or iCloud backups  —  Apple has confirmed to me that it already scans iCloud Mail for CSAM, and has been doing so since 2019.  It has not, however, been scanning iCloud Photos or iCloud backups.
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
Yogita Khatri / The Block:
Visa says it acquired CryptoPunk 7610, one of the 3,840 female punk NFTs, for around $150K last week, adding it to its art collection  —  Quick Take  — Visa has bought CryptoPunk 7610 as it enters into the world of NFT commerce.  — “NFTs are an intersection of culture and commerce …
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.”
Packy McCormick / Not Boring:
An in-depth look at Solana blockchain project: $0.0001/transaction and 65,000 transactions/second, well ahead of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and a $21.2B market cap  —  The $21B Blockchain and the Arrow of Time … Today's essay, the whole thing, is brought to you by... Solana  —  Hi friends 👋,
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
PayPal will launch its cryptocurrency service in the UK this week, the product's first international expansion since it debuted in the US in 2020  —  - PayPal will let British customers buy, hold and sell digital currencies, starting this week.  — It marks the first international expansion …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cape:
Most carriers track everything.  Cape doesn't.  —  Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more.  Switch today and get 29% off for life.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
Zoho Notebook: The free iPad note-taking app every student needs  —  If you're a student with an iPad, you already have one of the best note-taking devices in your hands.  The question is, does your app actually do it justice?
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

The Upstarts Podcast:
Abridge's Shiv Rao: The Doctor Founder Taking On Microsoft In Healthcare AI
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
OpenAI's Bots Break Containment and Hack Hugging Face Autonomously — With Alex Stamos
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Great Chat:
Too big to laugh: how tech lost its sense of humor
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Substack Wants To Become A Social Network; Beehiiv Wants To Stay Invisible
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Training Data:
Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming 'Dark Factory' Where Software Builds Itself
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:55 PM ET, August 23, 2021.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

Cecilia D'Anastasio / Wired:
Edd Gent / IEEE Spectrum:
Sami Fathi / MacRumors:
Elizabeth Dwoskin / Washington Post:
Post-Culture / @postcultrev: