Techmeme
January 17, 2021, 4:35 PM

Top News

Zoe Schiffer / The Verge:
GitHub apologizes to the employee it has fired for using the term “Nazis” on Jan. 6 and offers him his job back, says the company's head of HR has resigned  —  The company is offering the employee his job back  —  GitHub is admitting that a Jewish employee was fired in error and is offering him his job back.
Washington Post:
Dating apps like Tinder and Bumble are banning users identified in photos from the Capitol riot, and some users are relaying incriminating evidence to the FBI  —  Bumble, Tinder and others are freezing out rioters with help from law enforcement — and, in some cases, their own photos.
Issie Lapowsky / Protocol:
Bloomberg:
New York Times:
A look at the incentives, like guaranteed auction win percentages, that Facebook got from Google in the ad partnership that is now a focus of an antitrust suit  —  Facebook was going to compete with Google for some advertising sales but backed away from the plan after the companies cut a preferential deal, according to court documents.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
DuckDuckGo surpassed 100M daily search queries for the first time on Jan. 11; since August 2020, the search engine began seeing over 2B search queries per month  —  DuckDuckGo reaches historic milestone in a week when both Signal and Telegram saw a huge influx of new users.
Washington Post:
Analytics firm Zignal Labs: online misinformation about election fraud dropped 73% in the week after several social media sites suspended Trump and key allies  —  Zignal Labs charts 73 percent decline on Twitter and beyond following historic action against the president
New York Times:
Alex Danco:
A critique of Canada's tech startup ecosystem, whose growth is being held back by the mindset of angel investors, the government's SR&ED tax credits, and more  —  Toronto is not the next great startup scene.  Neither is Waterloo, or Vancouver, or anywhere in Canada.  —  I'm sorry that I have to write this.
Nellie Bowles / New York Times:
Interviews with more than two dozen tech execs and workers who have left San Francisco for other parts of the US over the last year amid a rise in remote work  —  As a tech era draws to an end, more workers and companies are packing up.  What comes next?  —  SAN FRANCISCO — The Bay Area struck a hard bargain with its tech workers.
Heather Knight / San Francisco Chronicle:
Jason Snell / Six Colors:
Due to Apple's security limitations and additional work required, few developers are bothering to port Chrome extensions to Safari, despite WebExtensions API  —  At WWDC 2020, Apple announced it was going to support Chrome-style browser extensions (the WebExtensions API) in Safari.
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
More than 20 current and former CD Projekt staff say development of Cyberpunk 2077 was marred by unchecked ambition, poor planning, and technical shortcomings  —  CD Projekt SA Chief Executive Officer Marcin Iwiński made a public mea culpa this week about the disastrous rollout of the video game Cyberpunk 2077 in December.
Lucas Matney / TechCrunch:
Researchers working on Twitter's bluesky effort discuss how its open decentralized standard for social media could hinder efforts to stop online radicalization  —  The platform's vision of a sweeping open standard could also be the far-right's internet endgame

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