Techmeme
February 23, 2021, 4:25 PM

Top News

Georgia Hitch / ABC:
Australia says Facebook agreed to reinstate news content in Australia in the coming days after the government promised amendments to its proposed media bill  —  We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work.
Alex Barker / Financial Times:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Google announces new features for Android, including a way to schedule texts and a Password Checkup tool to notify users of compromised credentials  —  Google today announced the next set of features coming to Android, including a new password checkup tool, a way to schedule your texts …
Tim Copeland / Decrypt:
Bitfinex and Tether agree to an $18.5M settlement with the New York AG and will stop operating in the state following a two-year probe  —  Bitfinex and Tether have agreed to stop all trading activity in the state of New York as part of a settlement announced today by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Q&A with Spotify's Daniel Ek on growing the number of creators on the service and engaging with them, podcast success metrics, Clubhouse, and more  —  Spotify hosted an event on Monday to discuss its ambitions in audio, and one message came through loud and clear: the company wants to play …
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Gene Park / Washington Post:
Sony says it's developing a VR headset for the PlayStation 5 that will be much less cumbersome than its current PS VR setup, but the device won't launch in 2021  —  The PlayStation 5 will have its own virtual reality headset, however, consumers may face ongoing difficulties obtaining a PS5 console given a supply chain shortfall.
Joe Rossignol / MacRumors:
Kuo: Apple plans to release two new MacBook Pro models with an HDMI port and an SD card reader in the second half of 2021  —  Apple plans to release two new MacBook Pro models equipped with an HDMI port and SD card reader in the second half of 2021, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo …
Stephen Warwick / iMore:
Some M1 Mac owners report a worryingly large number of writes to their Macs' SSDs, though in some cases it could be explained by faulty monitoring tools  —  “If this is accurate, some of these machines aren't going to last half a year”  —  What you need to know
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Quill, a messaging app that raised its Index Ventures-led $12.5M Series A in 2019, quietly comes out of stealth to take on Slack  —  Slack took the workplace communications landscape by storm after it launched its integration-friendly, GIF-tastic chat platform in 2013.
More: 9to5Mac
Natasha Mascarenhas / TechCrunch:
Filing: Reddit, which announced a $250 million Series E earlier this month, has added over $116M to the financing event  —  Reddit, which announced a $250 million Series E earlier this month, has added over $116 million to the financing event, upping the round's most recent total to $367 million, according to a new SEC filing.
The Information:
Source: ~40%, or 40M, of Disney+ subscribers are in the US, and Disney has said 30% are in India, so Europe and LatAm seem to make up less than a third of subs  —  Disney's flagship video-streaming service, Disney+, has quickly emerged as the only true competitor to Netflix …
Eugene Wei / Remains of the Day:
TikTok's networks effects, largely driven by remixability of content and features that interconnect, cannot be easily cloned by rivals to recreate the ecosystem  —  I promised one final piece on TikTok, focused primarily on the network effects of creativity.  And this is that, in part.
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Akamai finds a botnet using bitcoin transactions to put its control server's IP address on the blockchain, making it basically impossible to fully take down  —  Wallet transactions camouflage the IP address of the botnet's control server.  —  When hackers corral infected computers into a botnet …
More: The Akamai BlogTweets: @stillinbeta
Mickey Rapkin / Esquire:
Profile of Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, who has made millions of dollars by selling and auctioning his digital art on marketplaces for non-fungible tokens  —  He's a dad from Wisconsin who drives a “piece of shit” Corolla.  And his brilliantly absurd artwork has made him the face of a crypto market you didn't know existed.
Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch:
Wisetack, which provides buy-now-pay-later services for in-person business transactions, raises $19M across seed and Series A rounds  —  This morning Wisetack, a startup that provides buy-now-pay-later services to in-person business transactions, announced that is has closed a total …
More: FinSMEs and Greylock

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Zachary Fryer-Biggs / Washington Post:
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
The Verge:
Sami Fathi / MacRumors: