Techmeme
September 15, 2020, 12:40 PM

Top News

BuzzFeed News:
Internal memo from a fired Facebook data scientist says large amounts of inauthentic bot activity has boosted many countries' leaders, with Facebook slow to act  —  Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections …
David Gilbert / VICE:
Activists say ethnic violence in Ethiopia in recent months has been supercharged by hate speech on Facebook, which says it has increased monitoring of content  —  Want the best of VICE News straight to your inbox?  Sign up here.  —  Throughout his life, Ethiopian singer Hachalu Hundessa sang about love …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Sony has cut PS5 production for this fiscal year by 4M units to ~11M, following production issues with its custom-designed SoC  —  - Low yields of company's custom-designed silicon a bottleneck  — Sony facing aggressive pricing from Microsoft's Xbox team
Bloomberg:
Source: Apple tells staff it's no longer offering credit cards via Barclays, which offers zero interest financing, as it shifts to Apple Card financing plans  —  - Longtime credit-card deal offered Apple customers no interest  — Company to focus on Apple Card installment payments instead
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Russell Brandom / The Verge:
Alex Sherman / CNBC:
Seth Schiesel / Protocol:
Kurt Schlosser / GeekWire:
After retrieving a submerged shipping-container-size data center from Scotland's Orkney Islands, deployed in 2018, Microsoft says the project was a success  —  Two years after deploying a shipping-container-size data center to the depths off Scotland's Orkney Islands, Microsoft has reeled it back in …
TechCrunch:
Home buying startup Opendoor announces it's going public by merging with Chamath Palihapitiya's SPAC  —  Today, Social Capital Hedosophia II, the blank-check company associated with investor Chamath Palihapitiya, announced that it will merge with Opendoor, taking the private real estate startup public in the process.
Jay Rosen / The Verge:
Q&A with ex-CSO of Facebook Alex Stamos on why big newsrooms should have threat modeling teams, how media is amplifying disinformation with its coverage, more  —  An interview with Facebook's ex-security chief  —  Editor's note: We're barreling toward the 2020 election with big unresolved problems …
Cyrus Farivar / NBC News:
As Big Fish Games announces $155M class action settlement in WA, 21 users describe how they were hooked on casino-style apps and lost significant sums of money  —  Shellz, 37, a nurse from Houston, spends at least two hours a day with her husband playing a casino-style smartphone game called Jackpot Magic.
Taylor Soper / GeekWire:
Facebook paid $367.6M to buy a 400K square foot complex from REI in Bellevue, WA, expanding its 3M square feet office space footprint in Seattle  —  Facebook is yet again expanding in the Seattle region, its largest engineering hub outside of Silicon Valley.
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Anchor says it is cracking down on copycat podcasters by improving the detection of stolen podcasts, adding new rules around monetizing shows, and more  —  ‘This is definitely a new type of attack for Anchor’  —  Anchor, a Spotify-owned company, is addressing the copycat podcast problem that's roiled the industry for the past month.
Justine Calma / The Verge:
Facebook launches an information center to combat climate change misinformation and pledges to cut greenhouse gases from its global operations this year  —  It's also working to bring more reliable climate information to its users  —  Facebook today pledged to slash greenhouse gases …
Yuliya Chernova / Wall Street Journal:
Uruguay-based dLocal, a payments processing platform for emerging markets, raises $200M at a $1.2B valuation led by General Atlantic  —  The $200 million investment makes dLocal one of the best funded venture-backed technology companies in Latin America  —  Payments company dLocal Group Ltd. became …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources detail Apple's Tuesday event: Apple Watch Series 6 with faster CPU and blood oxygen meter, new mid-tier iPad Air, and no new iPhones  —  - Company to debut new Apple Watches and iPad Air on Tuesday  — Smaller HomePod, headphones in the works; iPhones coming later
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:

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:
The quiet power of email marketing to maximize impact for nonprofits  —  A life changed.  A problem solved.  A community strengthened.  A future made a little better than it was yesterday.For nonprofits, that's the metric.
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

Sources:
A quiet investor's $10 billion bet on AI, chips, and defense
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.
Cheeky Pint:
The company building America's uranium supply from scratch
Stripe cofounder John Collison interviews founders, builders, and leaders over a pint.
Subscribe to Cheeky Pint.
Grit:
The Difference Between 1% Improvements and 10x Growth | Immad Akhund
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
How a 19-year-old intern built the growth engine behind this $2B AI company | Hector Serrano
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
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.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:40 PM ET, September 15, 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

Earlier Picks

Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Chris Jaffe / YouTube Blog: