Techmeme
September 16, 2021, 8:00 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Internal docs show Facebook's weak response after staff flagged human traffickers and drug cartels using its platform for recruitment in developing countries  —  Employees raised alarms about how the site is used in developing countries, where its user base is already huge and expanding
Eric Slivka / MacRumors:
Initial benchmarks show iPhone 13's A15 chip offers a roughly 15% improvement for GPU performance and 10%-18% improvement for CPU performance over A14  —  Earlier today, we reported on a Geekbench Metal result for the iPhone 13 Pro showing an approximately 55% graphics performance improvement compared to the iPhone 12 Pro.
Filipe Espósito / 9to5Mac:
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Adam Mosseri faces criticism after comparing social media to cars, saying “cars create way more value than they destroy”, even though people die in accidents  —  - Facebook Instagram chief Adam Mosseri came under a flurry of criticism after comparing the value of social networks to society to that of cars.
Makena Kelly / The Verge:
Haroon Siddique / The Guardian:
Sir Clive Sinclair, the creator of the landmark ZX Spectrum who helped popularize the home computer, dies at age 81  —  Creator of the landmark ZX Spectrum and the less commercially successful C5 died after a long illness  —  Sir Clive Sinclair, the inventor and entrepreneur who was instrumental …
Richard Lawler / The Verge:
Alphabet's Project Taara, which uses light beams to deliver internet, says it transmitted nearly 700TB of data across the Congo River over 20 days  —  The 20Gbps Free Space Optical Communications tech for Project Taara was originally part of Project Loon  —  In January, Google's parent company …
Mitchell Clark / The Verge:
Nate Chastain, the head of product at OpenSea who was accused this week of a form of NFT insider trading, appears to no longer be working for the company  —  He's accused of buying NFTs before they appeared on the trading platform's homepage  —  OpenSea head of product Nate Chastain …
Reuters:
Facebook says it will use the same tactics that it uses to remove bot networks to target real-user accounts engaging in tactics like mass reporting  —  Facebook (FB.O) is taking a more aggressive approach to shut down coordinated groups of real-user accounts engaging in certain harmful activities …
Sarah McBride / Bloomberg:
Brooklyn-based Genius, a music-annotating startup that provides context for lyrics, sells its assets for $80M, less than the total funding it raised  —  The sale price is less than the total funding raised.  —  Music-annotating startup Genius Media Group Inc., a site that drew attention …
Joanna Ossinger / Bloomberg:
Avalanche Foundation, whose AVAX token is up 65% over the past week, raises $230M led by Polychain and Three Arrows Capital  —  - Cryptocurrency AVAX jumps 65% in past week to top 20 rankings  — Polychain, Three Arrows Capital led the investment purchase
Maggie Miller / The Hill:
FTC asks health apps, such as those tracking fitness or menstrual cycles, to notify consumers of data breaches as per the 2009 Health Breach Notification Rule  —  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted 3-2 Wednesday that a decade-old rule on health data breaches applies to apps …
Wenxin Fan / Wall Street Journal:
China erased Zhao Wei, its biggest movie star who had 86M Weibo followers, from its internet on August 26, amid a clampdown on its entertainment industry  —  Zhao Wei was the Reese Witherspoon of China, then she was censored by the Communist Party amid a clampdown of the country's entertainment industry
Politico:
DHS: American extremists used TikTok in the lead up to the Jan. 6 riots to recruit new members and share “tactical guidance” for terrorist and criminal activity  —  Extremists foreign and domestic have used the video platform, DHS says.  The app says it has “absolutely no place” for violence and hate.
Aaron Mak / Slate:
Inside r/aznidentity, a subreddit that has become an unofficial hub of “Men's Rights Asians” subculture, which has gained notoriety by harassing Asian women  —  They became notorious for trying to harass Asian women off the internet.  The racial trauma of the past year has only emboldened them.
Byron Tau / Wall Street Journal:
How law enforcement's ability to track people via commercially available data blurs the line between investigative due diligence and warrantless surveillance  —  Agencies' growing use of purchased data without warrants raises new legal questions  —  In January 2020, a 14-year-old girl …

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