Techmeme
August 8, 2020, 4:50 PM

Top News

Bobby Allyn / NPR:
Source: TikTok will sue the Trump administration over the executive order banning the service, as soon as Tuesday  —  TikTok is planning to sue the Trump administration, challenging the president's executive order banning the service from the United States.
Russell Brandom / The Verge:
Trump signs an executive order to block all transactions with ByteDance and WeChat starting Sept. 20, just 5 days after Microsoft's deadline to acquire TikTok  —  Microsoft is currently in talks to acquire the company  —  President Trump has signed a new executive order …
More: TikTok, New York Times, The Verge, Associated Press, The Guardian, NBC News, Engadget, The Guardian, The White House, International Business Times, CNN, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Verge, Ars Technica, Access Now, OneZero , CNET, I, Cringely, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, The Irish Times, CNBC, South China Morning Post, BIG by Matt Stoller, Hong Kong Free Press HKFP, Ubergizmo, PYMNTS.com, Los Angeles Times, CCN.com, Nikkei Asian Review, Financial Times, ExtremeTech, Reuters, Bloomberg, VentureBeat, Axios, Android Central, TheStreet, Music Technology Policy, Techdirt, Nikkei Asian Review, Adweek, Washington Post, Morning Brew, Polygon, The Logic, BBC, Tom's Guide, The Diplomat, and Fortune
Washington Post:
Inside the efforts to sell TikTok as Trump keeps sending contradictory signals, amid shouting matches between Mnuchin and Navarro in the Oval Office  —  Trump advisers Mnuchin and Navarro fought over TikTok as Silicon Valley dealmakers tried to get closer to Trump
New York Times:
Intelligence agencies don't see TikTok as a major security issue, see the claimed risks as largely theoretical, and view companies like Huawei as larger threats  —  Even as the White House moves against the Chinese social media app, the intelligence agencies do not see it as a major issue along the lines of Huawei.
Steven Levy / Wired:
Interview with Bill Gates on COVID-19, Trump, last week's antitrust meeting, Mark Zuckerberg, misinformation, and the “poison chalice” of the TikTok deal  —  The techie-turned-philanthropist on vaccines, Trump, and why social media is “a poisoned chalice.”
Steven Levy / Wired:
An inside look at Hawkfish, a Mike Bloomberg-funded tech company that helped his 2020 campaign, which is still working behind the scenes to help elect Joe Biden  —  With expensive data and tech heavy hitters, Hawkfish is backing the former mayor's promise to take on Donald Trump.
Olivia Solon / NBC News:
Internal docs: Facebook removed “strikes” so that at least 2 conservative pages, from PragerU and Diamond & Silk, dodged penalties under misinformation policies  —  Facebook has allowed conservative news outlets and personalities to repeatedly spread false information without facing …
Wall Street Journal:
A presentation that's been circulating around DC shows Qualcomm is lobbying the Trump administration for permission to sell its chips for Huawei's 5G phones  —  Smartphone chip maker warns of potentially losing billions of dollars in sales because of export limits
Elamin Abdelmahmoud / BuzzFeed News:
Companies like Facebook and Twitter, which have positioned themselves as the new public square, should absolutely be questioned on their role in cancel culture  —  Last week, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan asked a question at a Congressional hearing that seemed to come out of nowhere.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Facebook formally open-sourced Pysa, a static analyzer tool for Python code, which detected 44% of all security bugs in Instagram's server-side code in H1 2020  —  In the first half of 2020, Pysa detected 44% of all security bugs in Instagram's server-side Python code.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / VICE:
Reddit says it is investigating after hackers deface more than a dozen subreddits, including some with millions of subscribers, to post pro-Trump messages  —  Hackers took control and defaced several large subreddits to post pro-Trump content.  —  Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

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