Techmeme
March 15, 2021, 8:55 PM

Top News

Joseph Cox / VICE:
Hacker paid a company called Sakari $16 to reroute a reporter's texts and used SMS 2FA to break into his accounts, showing the need for regulation of SMS tools  —  A gaping flaw in SMS lets hackers take over phone numbers in minutes,by simply paying a company to reroute text messages.  —  Joseph Cox
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Queenie Wong / CNET:
Facebook debuts tools to promote COVID-19 vaccinations: helping US users find slots, partnering with health authorities on WhatsApp, labeling all vaccine posts  —  Facebook said Monday it's releasing new tools to make it easier for people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 …
Elizabeth Dwoskin / Washington Post:
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
Cruise acquires Voyage in another autonomous vehicle startup merger; Voyage focuses on fleets of low-speed vehicles making trips to retirement communities  —  Dense, urban testing meets low-speed retirement community testing  —  Cruise, a majority-owned subsidiary of General Motors …
Emily Birnbaum / Protocol:
Survey of 1,504 tech employees across the US: 78% say the tech industry is too powerful, 40% say it does more harm than good, 73% support more AI regulation  —  Big Tech executives do a lot of talking.  On their platforms, in interviews and on Capitol Hill.
News Corp:
News Corp says it has reached a three-year deal with Facebook to provide news to Facebook users in Australia through the Facebook News product  —  Expands News Corp-Facebook Connection, Which Began With Deal In US  —  New York, NY (March 15, 2021) - News Corp announced today that it has reached …
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
WeLeakInfo, which sold access to 12B+ stolen credentials before the FBI seized its domain, leaked account and payment info of over 24,000 of its own customers  —  A little over a year ago, the FBI and law enforcement partners overseas seized WeLeakInfo[.]com, a wildly popular service …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Adobe data on US e-commerce: consumers spent $844B online from March 2020 to February 2021, up $183B YoY, and are on track to spend over $1T annually by 2022  —  The COVID-19 pandemic boosted U.S. online shopping by $183 billion, according to a new report by Adobe's e-commerce division, released this morning.
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Kuo: Apple AirPods 3 will not enter mass production until Q3 2021; AirPods shipments will decline from 90M in 2020 to 78M in 2021 due to increasing competition  —  Despite a flurry of leaks surrounding next-gen AirPods in the last couple of weeks, Ming-Chi Kuo this morning said that new AirPods …
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Match Group invests in Garbo, a nonprofit that lets people run background checks with a first name and phone number, and will add the service to Tinder  —  Only a last name or phone number needed  —  Tinder and other Match Group-owned apps are going to let their users run background checks on possible dates.
AnandTech:
Review of the 3rd-gen EPYC Milan chips shows AMD continues to strengthen and maintain a very stark one-sided performance advantage against its main rival, Intel  —  The arrival of AMD's 3rd Generation EPYC processor family, using the new Zen 3 core, has been hotly anticipated.

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Reuters:
New York Times:
Tim Hardwick / MacRumors:
Financial Times:
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