Techmeme
August 23, 2021, 9:20 PM

Top News

Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
Researchers find 1,000+ web apps, from Ford, American Airlines, and others, mistakenly exposed 38M records stored on Microsoft's Power Apps service  —  Misconfigured Power Apps from Microsoft led to more than a thousand web apps accessible to anyone who found them.
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
After criticism, Centre, the consortium founded by Circle and Coinbase, says it will exclusively back its USDC stablecoin reserves with cash and US treasuries  —  - Digital currency company Circle says it's changing the makeup of its dollar-pegged stablecoin USD Coin to just cash and U.S. Treasury bonds.
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Instagram says it's retiring the swipe-up link feature, which allows users to visit external links by swiping up, in favor of tappable stickers starting Aug. 30  —  The swipe-up will be no more.  Instagram is planning to retire the feature, which allows people to visit external webpages by swiping up …
Turner Wright / Cointelegraph:
Substack begins accepting bitcoin as payment for subscriptions, initially for a few crypto publications, using payments processor OpenNode  —  Substack has more than 500,000 paid subscribers, but Bitcoin payments will first be available to “a select group of crypto-focused publications.”
Ben Lovejoy / 9to5Mac:
Apple confirms it has been scanning iCloud Mail for CSAM since 2019 but has not been scanning iCloud Photos or iCloud backups  —  Apple has confirmed to me that it already scans iCloud Mail for CSAM, and has been doing so since 2019.  It has not, however, been scanning iCloud Photos or iCloud backups.
Packy McCormick / Not Boring:
An in-depth look at Solana blockchain project: $0.0001/transaction and 65,000 transactions/second, well ahead of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and a $21.2B market cap  —  The $21B Blockchain and the Arrow of Time … Today's essay, the whole thing, is brought to you by... Solana  —  Hi friends 👋,
Yogita Khatri / The Block:
Visa says it acquired CryptoPunk 7610, one of the 3,840 female punk NFTs, for around $150K last week, adding it to its art collection  —  Quick Take  — Visa has bought CryptoPunk 7610 as it enters into the world of NFT commerce.  — “NFTs are an intersection of culture and commerce …
Gillian Tan / Bloomberg:
Nigerian mobile payments service OPay raises $400M led by Vision Fund 2 at a $2B valuation, marking SoftBank's first investment in Africa  —  - Sequoia Capital China and Redpoint China also participated  — Investment marks Vision Fund 2's first bet in Africa
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Facebook is running a test in the US to bring voice and video calling back to the main Facebook app, to reduce the need to jump between Facebook and Messenger  —  - New test will bring Messenger technology back into Facebook  —  Facebook Inc. is bringing voice and video calling …

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Earlier Picks

Cecilia D'Anastasio / Wired:
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Sami Fathi / MacRumors:
Elizabeth Dwoskin / Washington Post: