Techmeme
March 28, 2021, 11:45 AM

Top News

Nick Statt / The Verge:
Amazon is pursuing an increasingly aggressive PR strategy, picking fights with Democratic politicians such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on Twitter  —  Who is Amazon trying to convince?  —  Amazon is intensifying its bizarre online public relations strategy of picking increasingly petty …
USA Today:
NY State launches first US “vaccine passport” app, Excelsior Pass, built on IBM's blockchain-based health pass platform, to be used initially at large venues  —  Starting Friday, New Yorkers will be able to pull up a code on their cell phone or a printout to prove they've …
Jeff John Roberts / Decrypt:
Inside BitClout, the controversial service that tokenizes Twitter personalities, mostly without permission, and has $170M worth of BTC raised from a16z, others  —  Diamondhands greets me on the encrypted messaging app Signal.  He can see me over video, but his own video is turned off …
Reggie Ugwu / New York Times:
A look at Google's hands-off content moderation approach for Google Podcasts, where hate speech from white supremacists and pro-Nazi groups is easy to find  —  The platform's tolerance of white supremacist, pro-Nazi and conspiracy theory content pushes the boundaries of the medium.
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Apple releases iOS 14.4.2 and iOS 12.5.2 to fix a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability in WebKit that “may have been actively exploited”  —  Apple today released iOS 14.4.2 for iPhone and iPad, and watchOS 7.3.3 for Apple Watch.  The updates includes an important security fix for WebKit …
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Q&A with NYT's Kevin Roose on his new book Futureproof, how robotic process automation might replace some white-collar jobs, Microsoft Excel TikTok, and more  —  As the editor-in-chief of The Verge, I can theoretically assign whatever I want.  However, there is one topic I have failed …
Wall Street Journal:
Interviews and documents reveal that in the year before his death, Tony Hsieh was surrounded by people who lived off his fortune and enabled his risky lifestyle  —  The group that surrounded the late Zappos boss helped sustain his drug habit, protected him from outsiders and lived off his largess
Liam Tung / ZDNet:
Microsoft says 92% of vulnerable Exchange servers have been patched/mitigated, and reiterates that patches do not necessarily remove the access of the attacker  —  If you're cleaning up a infected Exchange server, you need to look for traces of multiple threats, warns Microsoft.
Krystal Hu / Reuters:
Report: close to half the tech M&A deals in the US included a stock consideration in 2020, the highest percentage since 2016, versus only 27% in 2019  —  (Reuters) - Cash may be king, but stock is queen in the land of technology mergers and acquisitions during a pandemic-fueled tech boom.

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Featured Podcasts

Hard Fork:
OpenAI Calls a 'Code Red' + Which Model Should I Use? + The Hard Fork Review of Slop
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
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Access:
Is Roblox making the internet better or worse? We asked the CEO
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
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Lenny's Podcast:
Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders" | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
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Great Chat:
Code red: our favorite tech rivalries
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Big Technology Podcast:
How An AI Model Learned To Be Bad — With Evan Hubinger And Monte MacDiarmid
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Earlier Picks

Abby Ohlheiser / MIT Technology Review:
Roland Li / San Francisco Chronicle: