Techmeme
June 23, 2020, 5:45 PM

Top News

Ian Hamilton / UploadVR:
Facebook says it will stop selling Oculus Go, ending app submissions for it in December, and vows to no longer make headsets that only track head rotation  —  Facebook will stop selling Oculus Go this year as the company sharpens its focus on fully positionally tracked VR headsets like Oculus Quest.
Lucas Matney / TechCrunch:
Ian Walker / Kotaku:
A former Mixer employee who worked at Microsoft for two years before joining the Mixer team in 2018 accuses management of failing to address racism at Mixer  —  Over the weekend, former Mixer employee Milan Lee shared a blog describing his experiences with racism while working …
New York Times:
Over 70 people, mostly women, have shared stories of discrimination, harassment, and sexual assault within the video game live-streaming industry since Friday  —  After more than 70 allegations surfaced on Twitter this weekend, gaming companies and streamers responded with action.
Isaac McIntyre / Dexerto:
Dana Mattioli / Wall Street Journal:
Amazon unveils a Climate Pledge Fund, which will invest an initial $2B in startups building sustainable technologies  —  Tech giant plans to invest in transportation, energy, food and other industries  —  Amazon.  AMZN 2.36% com Inc. is launching a $2 billion internal venture-capital fund focused …
Mark Wilson / Fast Company:
Segway, the two-wheeled, self-balancing vehicle known for the hype it generated in the early 2000s, ends production as the company lays off most of its staff  —  Steve Jobs said it would be bigger than the PC.  Some dubbed it the most hyped product since the Apple Macintosh.
Janus Rose / VICE:
1,000+ technologists, including some from MIT, Facebook, Google, urge Nature to not publish a paper that describes a system to predict crime based on faces  —  Technologists from MIT, Harvard, and Google say research claiming to predict crime based on human faces creates a “tech-to-prison pipeline” that reinforces racist policing.
David Gelles / New York Times:
TaskRabbit says CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot is stepping down after four years; she is one of the few Black female tech CEOs in Silicon Valley  —  Stacy Brown-Philpot, one of the few prominent black women in the technology industry, has led the gig worker marketplace for four years, and oversaw its sale to Ikea.
Nathaniel Popper / New York Times:
Small businesses complain about Square withholding 20%-30% of their customers' payments, which it said it was doing to protect against risky transactions  —  Small businesses say the Twitter chief's other company is holding on to 30 percent of their customers' payments during the pandemic.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Microsoft releases the first public preview of its Defender antivirus Android app, as Microsoft Defender ATP for Linux becomes generally available for all users  —  UPDATE: Microsoft Defender ATP for Linux has also exited public preview and is now generally available for all users.
Karin Matussek / Bloomberg:
A previously-suspended German antitrust order against Facebook gets reinstated amid pending lawsuit, after a judge says Facebook abuses its dominant position  —  - Social network giant is abusing its market power, judges say  — Antitrust order won't be suspended while suit is pending
Don Clark / New York Times:
Japanese supercomputer Fugaku is rated as the world's fastest, carrying out 2.8x more calculations/second than the second fastest, an IBM system at Oak Ridge  —  In the race for the most powerful computers, Fugaku, a Japanese supercomputer, recently beat American and Chinese machines.
Joe Rossignol / MacRumors:
Apple is opening up the U1 chip found in iPhone 11 models to developers with a new Nearby Interaction framework for iOS 14  —  Introduced last year, the U1 chip in iPhone 11 models enables Ultra Wideband support for improved spatial awareness, but Apple has so far only used the technology …
Olaf Storbeck / Financial Times:
Former Wirecard CEO Markus Braun has been arrested on suspicion of false accounting and market manipulation  —  Prosecutors accuse him of inflating German fintech company's balance sheet and revenues  —  Wirecard's former chief executive Markus Braun has been arrested on suspicion …
BuzzFeed News:
Trump's new executive order will suspend H-1B, J-1, and H-2B visas, be in effect until the end of the year, and not immediately affect workers already in the US  —  BuzzFeed News has reporters around the world bringing you trustworthy stories about the impact of the coronavirus.

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Amy Lewin / Sifted:
Tracy Young / Tracy writes:
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Tom Warren / The Verge: