Techmeme
January 16, 2020, 5:25 PM

Top News

Brad Smith / The Official Microsoft Blog:
Microsoft pledges to be carbon negative by 2030, remove all carbon it has ever emitted by 2050, and launches a $1B climate innovation fund  —  The scientific consensus is clear.  The world confronts an urgent carbon problem.  The carbon in our atmosphere has created a blanket of gas …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Facebook backed away from a plan to sell ads in WhatsApp but eventually plans to sell ads in its Status feature  —  Facebook-owned messaging service to focus on helping businesses connect with customers  —  Facebook Inc. FB 0.28% is backing away from efforts to sell ads in WhatsApp …
Lauren Feiner / CNBC:
Nancy Pelosi slams Facebook's “shameful” behaviour, saying it doesn't “care about truth” and schmoozes Trump's admin to avoid taxes and antitrust action  —  - During her weekly press briefing, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose district includes tech-heavy San Francisco …
New York Times:
Turkey lifted a two-and-a-half year ban on Wikipedia on Wednesday, restoring access after the country's top court ruled that blocking it was unconstitutional  —  The country's top court had ruled that the move was unconstitutional.  —  The Turkish government lifted a two-and-a-half-year ban …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Report: Twitch's top streamers leaving for other platforms has led to watched hours dropping 9.8% from Q3 to Q4 2019; YouTube Gaming was alone in growing in Q4  —  The loss of several big-name streamers is finally taking its toll on Twitch, according to a new report from StreamLabs and Newzoo out today.
Katie Kasunic / vpnMentor:
Personal details including uploaded government IDs of 4,000+ cam models, working for adult site PussyCash, were left exposed on an AWS S3 Bucket for days  —  The vpnMentor cybersecurity research team, led by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, have uncovered a leaking S3 Bucket with 19.95GB of visible data …
More: BBC and Yahoo Finance
Alexis C. Madrigal / The Atlantic:
As tech becomes the dominant force in the modern economy, Silicon Valley's culture since 1970s of nimble startups successfully challenging incumbents is fading  —  For decades, whole regions, nations even, have tried to model themselves on a particular ideal of innovation, the lifeblood of the modern economy.
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Microsoft begins rolling out its Chromium-based Edge browser, available now for Windows and macOS  —  Right on schedule, Microsoft today launched its new Edge browser based on Google's Chromium open source project.  You can download Chromium Edge now for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 …
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Annie Palmer / CNBC:

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:
3 smarter updates for your staffing pipeline  —  Staffing recruiters manage multiple client requirements, large candidate databases, and tight submission deadlines.  Finding suitable candidates is only the first step.
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 5:25 PM ET, January 16, 2020.

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

Ryan Gallagher / Bloomberg:
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Adam Bluestein / Marker:
Tom Schmidt / Dragonfly Research:

Earlier Picks

Kim Hart / Axios:
Jon Fingas / Engadget:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Alan Boyle / GeekWire:
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
James Vincent / The Verge:
Abner Li / 9to5Google: