Techmeme
December 29, 2021, 9:25 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: following Haugen's leaks, Meta sought to divide lawmakers along partisan lines to forestall regulation, as Zuckerberg told employees not to apologize  —  Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg drove response to disclosures about company's influence; sending deputies to testify in Congress
Washington Post:
As the US faces record COVID-19 infections, effective use of exposure notification apps is unlikely, given slow adoption and poor data on their efficacy  —  The United States is grappling with record-high infections, but adoption of the system is still far behind what its creators and proponents envisioned
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
HDMI Forum will introduce HDMI 2.1a, the new standard, at CES 2022, offering minor updates that will further complicate a system with haphazard device support  —  Brace yourself for yet another new HDMI standard  —  The HDMI standards are a mess.  HDMI 2.1, in particular …
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
T-Mobile confirms reports of a data breach caused by SIM swap attacks on a “very small number of customers”, following six other data breaches since 2018  —  T-Mobile confirmed that recent reports of a new data breach are linked to notifications sent to a “very small number of customers” who fell victim to SIM swap attacks.
Richard Lawler / The Verge:
Fortnite servers are back online after a major outage that lasted over five hours prevented players from logging on, among other issues  —  The hit battle royale game told players “You do not have permission to play Fortnite.”  —  There was some bad news if you're on winter break and hoping …
New York Times:
How tech founders and investors use the Qualified Small Business Stock tax break, a 1990s-era provision for SMBs, to minimize taxes on their investment profits  —  Once aimed at small businesses, a 1990s-era tax break has become a popular way for Silicon Valley founders and investors to avoid taxes on their investment profits.
Paul Butler:
Web3 game Axie Infinity's play-to-earn model blurs the lines between “player” and “worker”, creating a Ponzi scheme with built-in deniability  —  In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially people …
Bloomberg:
Apple puts Foxconn's southern India factory on probation after worker protests shut it down and an investigation revealed substandard living conditions  —  - Foxconn apologized for lapses in worker living conditions  — Apple has asked for corrective actions before factory reopens
Cobie:
The dogecoin bull run in 2021 and recent $SOS token airdrop by a third party to OpenSea users show that the only scarce resource in crypto is attention  —  People talk a lot about scarcity in crypto.  Whether it's enforcing digital scarcity through NFTs or the idea that “there's 55m millionaires but only 21m bitcoins”.

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Featured Podcasts

Hard Fork:
Anthropic's Cybersecurity Shock Wave + Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz on Their Sam Altman Investigation + One Good Thing
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
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The Upstarts Podcast:
Decagon's Jesse Zhang: Closing Customer Service Doom Loops With AI Concierges
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Access:
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The Nick, Dick and Paul Show:
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Nick Bilton, Dick Costolo, and Paul Kedrosky pull back the curtain on AI, startups, and the future rushing toward us, all with healthy dose of irreverence.
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Big Technology Podcast:
OpenAI vs. Anthropic's Direct Faceoff + Future of Agents — With Aaron Levie
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
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Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
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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.
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More News

Laura Forman / Wall Street Journal:

Earlier Picks

Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Kris Holt / Engadget:
Monica Alleven / Fierce Wireless:
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: