Techmeme
April 8, 2020, 10:10 PM

Top News

Michael McWhertor / Polygon:
Google makes Stadia free to use for anyone with a Gmail address and will give new users two months of Stadia Pro for free  —  Stadia Pro is also free for two months  —  Google's video game streaming platform, Stadia, is now free to anyone with a Gmail address, the company announced on Wednesday.
Eric S. Yuan / Zoom Blog:
Zoom gives updates on its progress with privacy and security: appointing a CISO Council and Advisory Board and bringing on Alex Stamos as an outside adviser  —  As I mentioned in my message on April 1, Zoom has seen tremendous growth and new use cases emerge over the past few weeks …
Matt Drange / Protocol:
Online ticketing service Eventbrite says it will lay off 45% of its employees; sources say Eventbrite has over 1,000 staff  —  Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz announced Wednesday during a companywide meeting that 45% of employees were being laid off, Protocol has learned.
Jason Gurwin / The Streamable:
Disney says Disney+ has 50M+ paid subscribers globally, and that its April 3 launch in India accounts for 8M Disney+ subscribers; stock is up ~6% after hours  —  Disney announced that the company has surpassed 50 million paid subscribers, following their launch in India and eight Western European countries …
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
Twitter removes a tool that let mobile users prevent some data from being shared with advertisers; EU users are exempt and need to opt in to sharing  —  Users in Europe are the exception  —  Twitter has removed a privacy feature that allowed all users to stop sharing some private information with advertisers.
Thomas Brewster / Forbes:
UK's NCSC and US DHS publish a list of 2,500 COVID-19-related threats they are tracking, including malicious websites and email addresses linked to scams  —  If you weren't already taking the rise of coronavirus-based cybercrime seriously, take note.  A rare joint alert has gone out from U.S …
Richard Nieva / CNET:
Google says Meet, its teleconferencing tool, is adding 2M new users a day and logged 2B minutes of video calls in March with daily usage up 25x from January  —  As people around the world hunker down in their homes to slow the spread of COVID-19, one technology has emerged as a lifeline to the outside world: video chat.
Eva Dou / Washington Post:
Luke O'Brien / HuffPost:
Investigation details facial recognition company Clearview AI's ties to the alt-right, including hiring employees with deep links to far-right extremists  —  Clearview AI, which has alarmed privacy experts, hired several far-right employees, a HuffPost investigation found.
Adam Cancryn / Politico:
Sources: White House team led by Jared Kushner has reached out to health tech companies about creating a real-time surveillance system for tracking COVID-19  —  White House senior adviser Jared Kushner's task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating …
Dave Gershgorn / OneZero :
Many US state, federal, and banking systems still use the 60-year-old COBOL language despite warnings, leading to a variety of issues like difficulty hiring  —  Retired engineers are coming to the rescue  —  ver the weekend, New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, made an unusual public plea during …
Andrei Frumusanu / AnandTech:
Evidence of benchmark cheating has been found in MediaTek chipsets used in smartphones from manufacturers including Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Sony  —  Mobile benchmark cheating has a long story that goes far back for the industry (well - at least in smartphone industry years) …
Talos Blog:
Cisco's Talos security group finds fingerprint scanners from Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and others can be bypassed by fake fingerprints made with 3D printing  —  Phone, computer fingerprint scanners can be defeated with 3-D printing — By Paul Rascagneres and Vitor Ventura.
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
Researchers outline three privacy-conscious approaches to COVID-19 app contact tracing: Bluetooth, redacted location tracing, and hashing servers and mix nets  —  Researchers are racing to achieve the benefits of location-tracking without the surveillance.  —  Before the Covid-19 pandemic …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Airbnb has held talks about raising an additional $500M to $1B in debt, after announcing a $1B debt and equity deal on Monday, to weather the pandemic  —  - Company considering raising $500 million to $1 billion  — Valuation fell to $18 billion in Monday's debt-equity deal
Charles Levinson / Protocol:
CEO of gay dating app Scruff talks about avoiding partnerships with location data brokers due to privacy concerns and building an in-house analytics operation  —  A few years ago, a particular type of email began showing up in the inbox of Eric Silverberg, whose gay dating app, Scruff …

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Earlier Picks

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