Techmeme
April 9, 2021, 6:50 AM

Top News

New York Times:
Union seeking to represent Amazon workers in AL says 3,215 ballots were cast; half of ballots have been counted, votes against unionization have 2-1 advantage  —  With about half the ballots counted late Thursday, votes against unionization had a more than 2-to-1 advantage over those in favor …
Katie Canales / Insider:
Report: hackers scraped data of 500M LinkedIn users and posted it for sale online; LinkedIn confirms the dataset includes publicly viewable info from its site  —  - Personal data from 500 million LinkedIn users has been scraped and is reportedly for sale on a hacking forum.
Patrick McGee / Financial Times:
Filipe Espósito / 9to5Mac:
Ben Lovejoy / 9to5Mac:
Kim Lyons / The Verge:
Verizon is recalling 2.5M Ellipsis Jetpack mobile hotspots, ~1.3M of which are in use, after investigation found batteries could overheat and cause fire hazards  —  The CPSC says the devices' batteries are the source of the overheating  —  Verizon said Thursday it is working …
Amanda Macias / CNBC:
US Commerce Department adds seven Chinese supercomputing entities to an export blacklist for allegedly building supercomputers used by Chinese military  —  - Commerce added seven Chinese supercomputing entities to a U.S. economic blacklist citing national security concerns.
The Markup:
Investigation finds Google uses a secret blocklist to stop advertisers from making YouTube ad campaigns for hate terms; it worked less than a third of the time  —  Many well-known White supremacist and White nationalist terms and slogans were not blocked  —  First of two parts.
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Amid a mental health crisis because of COVID-19, Stanford researchers found that most tech platforms have no policies related to discussions of self-harm  —  Exclusive: Amid a rising mental health crisis, Stanford researchers find many companies ignoring posts about self-harm
David Priest / CNET:
Samsung announces $40 SmartTag+, which uses Bluetooth and UWB to locate lost items, and AR to guide users to them, launching globally on April 16  —  Samsung has announced it will launch its new $40 SmartTag Plus globally on April 16, with US availability to follow “in the coming weeks.”
Luke Plunkett / Kotaku:
Intel details Bleep, which uses AI to redact audio when it detects “hate speech” and lets users toggle how much they want to hear  —  Intel gave a presentation at GDC a few weeks back, but I'm guessing nobody actually watched it because it took until this week for anyone to notice …
Elizabeth Dwoskin / Washington Post:
Lawsuit alleges that, since 2017, civil rights groups have flagged hundreds of anti-Muslim Pages and Groups to Facebook, more than half of which stayed up  —  Suit says the company made false claims to consumers by promising, at congressional hearings, that it quickly removes hate groups and hate speech
Matt Mullenweg:
Matt Mullenweg denounces Wix's bizarre marketing campaign against WordPress and says Wix's business model “is getting customers to pay more and more every year”  —  Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it …
R. Lawler / Engadget:
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have recovered after a brief outage; Facebook says a configuration change caused the issue  —  After a brief outage, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are available once again.

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More News

Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:

Earlier Picks

Ian Carlos Campbell / The Verge:
James Vincent / The Verge:
Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch:
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Vikas SN / The Economic Times:
Madhumita Murgia / Financial Times:
Max Chafkin / Bloomberg: