Techmeme
December 21, 2020, 10:15 AM

Top News

The Citizen Lab:
Citizen Lab: NSO's zero-day, zero-click exploit chain, active in at least iOS 13.5.1, was used to hack ~36 Al Jazeera reporters via iMessage in summer of 2020  —  Summary & Key Findings  — In July and August 2020, government operatives used NSO Group's Pegasus spyware …
Daisuke Wakabayashi / New York Times:
Profile of Dina Srinivasan, who is helping Texas AG's antitrust investigation of Google after her treatises on Facebook and Google reframed antitrust thinking  —  Regulators are relying on insiders like Dina Srinivasan, who left her digital ad job after concluding that “Facebook and Google …
Andrés Arrieta / Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Matt Stoller / BIG:
Cecilia D'Anastasio / Wired:
Cyberpunk 2077's developer hamstrung reviewers by forcing NDAs and sending copies just days before launch to prevent players from seeing the buggy mess  —  Video game companies are increasingly putting restrictions on what reviewers can show, widening the gap between expectations and reality.
Wall Street Journal:
Analysis finds 24+ organizations that installed SolarWinds code, including Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, VMware, Belkin, a CA hospital, and Kent State university  —  A Wall Street Journal analysis identified at least 24 organizations that installed software laced with malicious code by Russian hackers
Jacob Knutson / Axios:
Aislinn Keely / The Block:
Personal information of 270K+ customers of hardware wallet Ledger has been leaked online, including emails, home addresses, and phone numbers  —  A database containing the personal information of over 270,000 Ledger customers has been published on RaidForums, a marketplace for buying, selling, and sharing hacked information.
Nico Grant / Bloomberg:
Zoom says it is under investigation by the SEC and two US attorney offices over security and privacy issues and interactions with China and other governments  —  - Company says data security, privacy actions under review  — Videoconferencing firm's contacts with China spur scrutiny
Isabel Woodford / Sifted:
Study: the number of neobanks worldwide has tripled since 2017, climbing to nearly 300; in 2019, more than 70 neobanks went live  —  The number of neobanks worldwide has tripled since 2017, climbing from 100 to nearly 300 worldwide.  —  That means, over the last three years …
The Economic Times:
Pine Labs, which makes POS software and provides last-mile retail transaction tech for merchants, raises $75M-$100M at a $2B valuation  —  Pine Labs is currently India's third largest fintech startup after Paytm and PhonePe.  It counts Lone Pine Capital, Sequoia India, Temasek, Mastercard, Paypal and Actis LLP as among its investors.
Owen Thomas / San Francisco Chronicle:
Profile of Bret Taylor, Salesforce's new COO and the architect of its $27.7B acquisition of Slack, who might one day succeed Marc Benioff as CEO of the company  —  Everyone in Silicon Valley seems to know Bret Taylor.  —  Few outside do.  —  That's going to change, as the software engineer …

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Featured Podcasts

Hard Fork:
OpenAI Calls a 'Code Red' + Which Model Should I Use? + The Hard Fork Review of Slop
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.
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Access:
Is Roblox making the internet better or worse? We asked the CEO
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
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Lenny's Podcast:
Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders" | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
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Great Chat:
Code red: our favorite tech rivalries
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
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Big Technology Podcast:
How An AI Model Learned To Be Bad — With Evan Hubinger And Monte MacDiarmid
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More News

Pranshu Verma / New York Times:
Rene Ebersole / National Geographic:

Earlier Picks

Lingling Wei / Wall Street Journal:
Michael Steeber / 9to5Mac:
Katie Bo Williams / Defense One: