Techmeme
January 2, 2021, 6:10 PM

Top News

New York Times:
Sources: investigators are checking if SolarWinds was hacked via its offices in Czechia, Poland, and Belarus, where the company moved much of its engineering  —  Those behind the widespread intrusion into government and corporate networks exploited seams in U.S. defenses and gave away nothing to American monitoring of their systems.
Nicole Perlroth / New York Times:
Microsoft says SolarWinds hackers were able to view some of its source code by hacking into an employee account but were unable to modify code or access emails  —  The hackers gained more access than the company previously revealed, though the attackers were unable to modify code or access emails.
William C. Gustafson / GitHub:
Developer of Amphetamine says Apple agreed to let the Mac app stay up with its current name and logo, after previously threatening to remove it due to its name  —  Amphetamine is a free app that helps keep your Mac awake.  Amphetamine has been on the Mac App Store since 2014 and it's been downloaded over 432,800 times.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Researchers: more than 100K Zyxel firewalls and VPN gateways have a hardcoded admin-level backdoor that can grant attackers root access to devices  —  The username and password (zyfwp/PrOw!aN_fXp) were visible in one of the Zyxel firmware binaries.  —  More than 100,000 Zyxel firewalls …
Katie Paul / Reuters:
Rob Leathern, Facebook's chief of advertising integrity who handled ad products around sensitive subjects, says he left the company on December 30  —  (Reuters) - Facebook Inc's chief of advertising integrity, who handled the company's ad products around sensitive subjects such as politics …
Mark Sullivan / Fast Company:
35 tech executives, investors, and experts offer their forecasts on tech trends in 2021, from increased investments in remote work to new data governance models  —  As we come to the end of a crazy 2020, many of us are suffering from COVID-19 exhaustion.  But as two vaccines begin their rollouts …
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
A look at the tech companies and people that helped with issues from COVID-19 to wildfires to Black Lives Matter in 2020  —  This year, technology firms big and small stepped up to help with the Covid-19 pandemic and other thorny challenges.  —  Some years, I have to dig deep to come …
T.C. Sottek / The Verge:
Siva Vaidhyanathan / New Republic:
Criticism of Facebook must move beyond content moderation issues; the effort to invent and invest in public cultural institutions should be our focus instead  —  Every day, a Twitter account run by Kevin Roose, a technology reporter for The New York Times, posts a list of the top 10 sources …
Reuters:
Huawei removes and then reinstates Tencent games on its app store after a dispute over revenue sharing; source: Huawei insisted on receiving a 50% cut  —  HONG KONG/BEIJING (Reuters) - Tencent's online games were removed and then reinstated on Huawei's app store on Friday in a dispute over revenue sharing by the Chinese companies.
Ernesto Van der Sar / TorrentFreak:
Search traffic to piracy sites dropped roughly a third from December 2019 to November 2020, coinciding with updates to Google's algorithm in January and May  —  When the file-sharing boom started twenty years ago, most ‘sharing’ took place in dedicated applications such as Napster and Limewire.

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Wall Street Journal:
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Max Zimmerman / Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

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