Techmeme
December 31, 2021, 12:55 AM

Top News

Adi Robertson / The Verge:
OpenSea bans PHAYC and Phunky Ape Yacht Club, two NFT projects dueling over which is the authentic Bored Ape Yacht Club ripoff  —  And dodging NFT marketplace bans while doing it  —  A pair of non-fungible token projects are testing the boundary between plagiarism and parody.
Brian Quarmby / Cointelegraph:
Ethereum scaling project Polygon says it quietly fixed a bug that put $23.6B in MATIC tokens at risk, but not before $2.04M in tokens was stolen  —  “Considering how much was at stake, I believe our team has made the best decisions possible given the circumstances,” said Polygon's co-founder Jaynti Kanani.
Tim / Droid Life:
Google pauses the rollout of its December update for the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro until late January after reports of calls dropping and disconnecting  —  In a bit of frustrating news, Google has confirmed that it has paused the December update for the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, aka the first Feature Drop update for the two devices.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Apptopia: Amazon ranked #4 in global shopping app installs in 2021, down from first in 2020, as e-commerce apps Shopee and Shein rose to #1 and #2, respectively  —  Amazon's leading position in U.S. e-commerce is well-documented, but the latest global rankings for app installs show the potential …
Brian Newar / Cointelegraph:
South Korea tells Apple and Google to stop accepting play-to-earn games, which require in-app purchases before playing, and remove existing ones from app stores  —  The Games Committee has strengthened its stance against P2E games by saying those games should not receive an age rating needed to get listed on app marketplaces.
Tage Kene-Okafor / TechCrunch:
African tech startups raised a record $4B+ in 2021, more than 2019 and 2020 combined, with more $100M+ rounds than ever before  —  African VC reached new heights in 2021 at over $4 billion and there's never been a better time to be bullish  —  Two years ago, the African tech ecosystem saw newfound attention …
Will Oremus / Washington Post:
Metaverse products from Meta, Microsoft, and others are just 3D virtual social spaces, and lack key features of the metaverse concept, chiefly interoperability  —  Meta's ‘Horizon Worlds’ app, Microsoft and Roblox are capitalizing on a buzzword that's far from reality
Reuters:
Six women who work at Foxconn's Indian iPhone plant describe crowded dorms and food crawling with worms, which sickened 250+ workers, leading to protests  —  For women who assembled iPhones at a Foxconn plant in southern India, crowded dorms without flush toilets and food sometimes crawling …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
SubQ Snap 1.1: the first long-context decision model for real enterprise work  —  Tied for #1 on the AA Decision Index, Snap is a multimodal model with a 384k-token context window for fast reasoning and agentic decisions.
Zoho:
Update on Node.js vulnerabilities CVE-2026-111497, CVE-2026-105482, CVE-2026-105483 and CVE-2026-106069  —  Overview On October 21, 2026, Node.js announced security releases for the 26.x, 24.x and 22.x release lines to fix multiple vulnerabilities.
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.
WebBrain:
WebBrain: an open-source AI agent for your browser  —  Read pages, fill forms and automate tasks in Chrome or Firefox.  Use local models or your preferred AI provider.  Get started free.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
Big Tech's Ugly Week, Getting Rich At Anthropic, AI Costs Plunge
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.
Machine Gods:
OpenAI's Latest Discoveries Spark a Backlash + Help! My Kid Hates AI
The official podcast of the singularity, from Casey Newton and Kevin Roose. Twice-weekly news, analysis, and interviews with the people who are building the future.
Subscribe to Machine Gods.
The Upstarts Podcast:
The Accidental YC Founder Solving AI's GPU Crisis | SF Compute's Evan Conrad
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.
Cheeky Pint:
Why Sam Altman is against a single superintelligence
Stripe cofounder John Collison interviews founders, builders, and leaders over a pint.
Subscribe to Cheeky Pint.
Great Chat:
The case for AI optimism
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.
Sources:
Tobi Lütke on the AI agent revolution and future of Shopify
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:55 AM ET, December 31, 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

Rebecca Feng / Wall Street Journal:
Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:

Earlier Picks

Richard Lawler / The Verge:
Washington Post:
Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch: