Techmeme
July 1, 2021, 3:10 PM

Top News

Dan Primack / Axios:
Robinhood files for long-awaited IPO, says it will set aside up to 35% of shares for retail investors  —  Popular trading app Robinhood on Thursday filed for its initial public offering, and disclosed that it will set aside up to 35% of shares for retail investors who rarely get to buy at a company's IPO price.
Austin Carr / Bloomberg:
Documents and interviews detail how a junior Microsoft engineer exploited a bug to generate Xbox gift card codes worth $10.1M+ before his arrest in Nov. 2020  —  The Xbox gift card came with a string of 25 letters and numbers.  The digits, known as a 5x5 code, were sent in an email …
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
TikTok is rolling out longer videos of up to three minutes, up from one minute, to all users over the coming weeks, after testing them since December  —  Now up to three minutes  —  TikToks are about to get longer.  The app is now rolling out the ability for everyone to publish videos …
Catalin Cimpanu / The Record:
NSA, FBI, and others say Russian hacking group Fancy Bear has been using Kubernetes to run brute force attacks on US and foreign organizations since mid-2019  —  US and UK cybersecurity agencies said today that a Russian military cyber unit has been behind a series of brute-force attacks …
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Adam Mosseri says Instagram plans to test video more broadly, calls TikTok and YouTube competitors, and says Instagram is “no longer a photo-sharing app”  —  - Facebook's head of Instagram said the service plans to start showing users full-screen, recommended videos in their feeds.
Jason Snell / Six Colors:
As Apple releases macOS Monterey public beta, an in-depth look at Focus, iCloud Private Relay, Safari's revamped UI, FaceTime, SharePlay, and other new features  —  If there's a theme of Apple's operating-system releases in 2021, it's platform unification.  This development is most significant …
Thomas Claburn / The Register:
Sources: IBM's company-wide email migration, 18 months in the making, has left many employees unable to use email or schedule calendar events for several days  —  IBM's planned company-wide email migration has gone off the rails, leaving many employees unable to use email or schedule calendar events.
Eugene Kim / Insider:
Politico:
Around 130 countries, including all G20 nations, agree to a global tax deal, aimed at world's 100 biggest companies and setting minimum corporate rates at 15%  —  The world's largest economies agreed Thursday to sweeping changes to the global tax system, despite staunch opposition …
Matt Day / Bloomberg:
Days before Bezos steps aside, Amazon adds two points to its 14 corporate values, requiring staff to consider welfare of coworkers and society at large  —  - Workers now required to consider employee welfare, society  — Employees are hired, evaluated on how they conform to list
Nina Bambysheva / Forbes:
Brazil's largest crypto exchange Mercado Bitcoin raises $200M Series B from SoftBank Latin America Fund, valuing its parent company 2TM Group at $2.1B  —  I cover cryptocurrencies and other applications of blockchain  —  Brazil's leading cryptocurrency exchange, Mercado Bitcoin raised $200 million …
Saqib Shah / Engadget:
Facebook is making its free cloud gaming service for desktop and Android available to 98% of mainland US and partners with Ubisoft  —  Oculus VR and livestreams, Facebook's gaming ambitions also include the cloud.  Today, the company is making free game streaming available to 98 percent …
Politico:
Former Trump spokesman Jason Miller leads GETTR, a Twitter-like service that bills itself as a “non-bias social network”, in the newest pro-MAGA tech venture  —  GETTR will be the newest MAGA venture in this space.  It's being led by Trump's former spokesman, Jason Miller.
Kyle Bradshaw / 9to5Google:
Google updates its Passes API to let users store COVID vaccine cards on Android devices, starting in the US, and says it won't keep a copy of user's information  —  Google has announced today that Google Pay is now capable of saving and displaying COVID-19 vaccination cards on Android …
Jonathan Zittrain / The Atlantic:
A look at link rot, and projects like Perma, which are trying to give authors of enduring documents like scholarly papers a way to preserve links permanently  —  Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Alex Hern / The Guardian:
Facebook, Google, Twitter, and TikTok sign up to pledge led by WWWF, to overhaul their moderation systems to tackle the abuse of women on their platforms  —  Facebook, Google, Twitter and TikTok commit to overhaul their platform's moderation systems  —  Four of the world's largest social networks …
ACLU:
Maine enacts the strongest statewide facial recognition law in the US, prohibiting the use of facial recognition tech in public schools and most police work  —  AUGUSTA, Maine - Maine has enacted the country's strongest statewide facial recognition law.  Maine's law prohibits the use …
BBC:
Amazon launches Echo Dot Kids Edition in the UK, several years after it was made available in the US  —  Amazon is launching a child-friendly version of its Echo Dot smart speaker in the UK, several years after it was made available in the US.  —  The speaker - which comes with either …
Sam Shead / CNBC:
Amazon says it is setting up a new development center in Helsinki to support Amazon Scout, an autonomous delivery robot that the company is testing in the US  —  - The Seattle-headquartered tech giant said in a blog post that it is setting up a new “Development Center” to support Amazon Scout …

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David Ingram / NBC News: