Techmeme
March 4, 2021, 9:10 PM

Top News

Katherine Rosman / New York Times:
Square acquires a majority stake in Jay-Z's streaming service Tidal for $297M; Jay-Z will join Square's board  —  What did Jay-Z and Jack Dorsey talk about when they went yachting around the Hamptons together last summer?  Perhaps only Beyoncé knows.  —  Maybe now we do, too.
Javier Espinoza / Financial Times:
Sources: EU is set to press antitrust charges against Apple over App Store rules for competing music streaming services, following a complaint by Spotify  —  Brussels set to formally press charges alleging tech company used its dominance to squeeze out App Store rivals
Bloomberg:
UK antitrust authorities say they plan to investigate Apple's App Store to probe whether it is abusing its market power to restrict competition  —  - CMA taking into account Apple's ‘dominant’ position in apps  — Apple probe prompted by complaints from some developers
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft rolls out new features for Edge, including vertical tabs and a feature that it says can improve startup times by 29% to 41% after a device reboots  —  Microsoft Edge gets some new features for March  —  Microsoft is rolling out some new improvements to its Edge browser this month.
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Leaked images show Sonos Roam, the company's smallest portable speaker, expected to ship on April 20 for $169  —  You're looking at the first images of the next speaker from Sonos.  Set to be priced at $169, the new device — it's called the Sonos Roam — is much smaller than the Sonos Move …
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
In the past month, three of the longest-running Russian cybercrime forums have been hacked, leaking their users' email addresses, login metadata, and more  —  Over the past few weeks, three of the longest running and most venerated Russian-language online forums serving thousands of experienced cybercriminals have been hacked.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Apple clarifies that users can't actually set a default music service in iOS 14.5 but has a feature that lets Siri attempt to learn preferred listening apps  —  Apple has clarified that the iOS 14.5 beta is not actually allowing users to select a new default music service, as has been reported.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Google says it is speeding up the Chrome release cycle and will ship a new milestone every four weeks instead of the current six weeks  —  Google today announced that its Chrome browser is moving to a faster release cycle by shipping a new milestone every four weeks instead of the current six-week cycle …
Saqib Shah / Engadget:
Qualcomm announces Snapdragon Sound, an initiative to enhance the wireless sound experience by lowering latency and improving connection issues  —  Just days after it unveiled its project to bring  —  advanced haptics to Android, Qualcomm has announced another ambitious venture aimed at bridging the gaps in device performance.
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Facebook adds one-to-one voice and video calling to the WhatsApp desktop app, but the browser version, WhatsApp Web, is not getting this feature at the moment  —  WhatsApp is rolling out support for voice and video calling to its desktop app, the Facebook-owned messaging service said Thursday …
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Virtual events startup Hopin raises $400M at a $5.65B valuation, more than double its valuation in its November round  —  - Hopin says it's raised $400 million at a $5.65 billion valuation, more than double what it was worth in a November investment round.  — The latest financing round …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Stream, which lets developers build chat and activity streams into apps and other services with a few lines of code, raises $38M Series B  —  A lot of our communication these days with each other is digital, and today one of the companies enabling that — with APIs to build chat experiences into apps …
More: Stream and VentureBeat
Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
Zimperium analysis: 14% of Android and iOS apps connecting to cloud services like AWS or Azure, totaling ~19K apps, have misconfigurations that expose user data  —  It's the digital equivalent of leaving your windows or doors open when you leave the house—and in some cases, leaving them open all the time.
New York Times:
Amazon has significantly expanded its footprint in NYC, where ~2.4M packages are delivered daily, adding at least nine delivery stations in the past year  —  The e-commerce giant added at least nine new warehouses in the city over the past year as 2.4 million packages a day strained the nation's largest urban delivery system.
Greg Kumparak / TechCrunch:
Whatnot, a livestreaming service for buying and selling Pokémon cards and other collectibles, raises $20M Series A led by a16z  —  When I first wrote about Whatnot in February of last year, they were just getting started.  Aiming to be the GOAT of collectible toys …
Gilad Edelman / Wired:
Study: far-right pubs get 65% more engagement on Facebook when they publish fake news; liberal and centrist pubs get less engagement if they publish misinfo  —  Far-right pages that publish misinformation get the most interactions by far compared to other news sources, new research shows.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Facebook says its new AI model SEER, which was trained with self-supervision on a billion public Instagram images, outperformed advanced fully supervised models  —  Facebook today announced that it's created an AI model trained on a billion images that ostensibly achieves state-of-the-art results …

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