Techmeme
April 14, 2020, 8:15 AM

Top News

TechCrunch:
Apple and Google reps confirm contact tracing update will be for devices with iOS 13 or Android 6+ via Google Play, say only health authorities can access API  —  Last week, Apple and Google announced a partnership that will soon let users opt-in to a decentralized tracing tool …
Ross Anderson / Light Blue Touchpaper:
Leo Kelion / BBC:
Jay Peters / The Verge:
ESRB, the organization that rates the content of video games, announces a new label for games that offer in-game purchases of loot boxes or other similar items  —  It's an additional descriptor to the ‘In-Game Purchases’ label introduced in 2018  —  The Entertainment Software Rating Board …
Dana Mattioli / Wall Street Journal:
Krystal Hu / Reuters:
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Credentials for 500,000+ Zoom accounts are being sold on the dark web and hacker forums for less than a penny each, and in some cases, given away for free  —  Over 500 hundred thousand Zoom accounts are being sold on the dark web and hacker forums for less than a penny each, and in some cases, given away for free.
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Starting April 18, Zoom will allow paying customers to opt in or out of specific data center regions after some calls were inadvertently routed through China  —  Free users can't change their region, but data won't be routed through China  —  Zoom will let paying customers pick …
Bloomberg:
Apple responds to Dem senators' letter regarding the privacy of its COVID-19 tools, saying the tools are not subject to HIPAA rules but don't collect user data  —  Apple Inc. responded to Democratic Senators who sent a letter to Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook with questions related …
Bloomberg:
Apple's iPhone shipments in China jumped 19% YoY in March to 2.5M units, while overall smartphone sales, including Android devices, fell ~22% to 21M shipments  —  - China's phone market continued decline, official data show  — Foxconn production back to normal levels in late March
Anuradha Raghu / Bloomberg:
As the COVID-19 pandemic shuts down large parts of the global economy, geospatial analytics companies are tracking food supplies via satellites, drones, more  —  As the coronavirus pandemic leads to anxiety over the strength of the world's food supply chains, everyone from governments to banks are turning to the skies for help.
Cory Weinberg / The Information:
As the coronavirus pandemic threatens to unravel Airbnb's business, some question whether CEO Brian Chesky can shift focus from new pursuits to preserving cash  —  The founder of the travel rental site has spent more than a decade building the company into one of the world's most influential startups.
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Instagram updates its IGTV app with a hands-free recording mode, a Discover tab, and a redesigned homepage featuring a recommended creator at the top  —  Is anyone using this app, though?  —  Instagram is updating its IGTV app today, likely in the hopes of getting more people to use …

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:
Pro tips: 5 ways to close WhatsApp leads in Zoho CRM  —  This is a guest post by Orkhan Jafarli, Growth PM at TimelinesAI.More buyers now reach out on WhatsApp before they ever fill out a form.
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

Hard Fork:
OpenAI Models Go Rogue + Kimi K3 Freakout + A.I. Superforecasting
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.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
The Talk Show With John Gruber:
'A Scam Held Together With Patriotism and Golden Paint', With Quinn Nelson
The director's commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.
Subscribe to The Talk Show With John Gruber.
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.
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 8:15 AM ET, April 14, 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

Lauren Feiner / CNBC:
William J. Broad / New York Times:

Earlier Picks

Chris Stokel-Walker / OneZero:
AFP:
Bloomberg: