Techmeme
November 19, 2021, 9:20 PM

Top News

Kelly Crow / Wall Street Journal:
ConstitutionDAO, which crowdfunded over $40M, loses Sotheby's US Constitution auction to a $43.2M bid from Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin  —  The 53-year-old billionaire paid $43.2 million for the historic document; he plans to lend it to a museum in Arkansas  —  Chicago hedge-fund billionaire …
Matt Burgess / Wired UK:
DuckDuckGo launches App Tracking Protection for Android, a beta feature that blocks third-party trackers from Google and Facebook  —  The privacy-focused tech company's latest update promises to block invasive data collection across your whole phone.  —  At the end of April …
Reuters:
Internal documents describe how Amazon's lobbying helped it kill or undermine privacy protections in more than three dozen bills across 25 US states  —  The governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, speaking in 2018 after Amazon picked the state as the site of its new headquarters.
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Defense Department solicits bids from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle for cloud contracts; DoD canceled its $10B JEDI contract in July  —  - The U.S. Defense Department expects to dole out cloud contracts to multiple companies.  — The new push comes after Pentagon scrapped its plans …
Steven Levy / Wired:
Alphabet X's Everyday Robots says it now has a fleet of 100+ robot prototypes that are autonomously performing tasks like wiping tables around its offices  —  Plus: The man behind a famous paradox, the laws that will govern the metaverse, and a deadly swarm of scorpions.  —  Hi, everyone!
Matthew Gault / VICE:
An artist and programmer in Australia creates The NFT Bay, a torrent website where anyone can download 15TB of NFT JPEGs  —  An artist and programer in Australia has uploaded 15 Terabytes of NFTs to a server.  Here's the torrent for them.  —  Matthew Gault
Ryan Broderick / Garbage Day:
Thinkarete Lifestyle, cited by Facebook as Q3's most widely viewed Page in the US, seems to be a barely active drop-shipping scheme with stolen content  —  Read to the end for a fascinating thread about why music sucks now  —  Unmasking The Most Viral Page On Facebook
Catie Keck / The Verge:
A look at Open Connect, Netflix's in-house CDN that launched a decade ago and spans 17,000 servers across 158 countries  —  As hundreds of thousands of households worldwide tapped into Netflix's Squid Game last month, viewers may have taken something fairly extraordinary for granted.
Dade Hayes / Deadline:
Disney adds Disney+ and ESPN+ to Hulu + Live TV, and will raise its monthly price by $5 to $70 for the ad-supported tier and $76 for ad-free, starting Dec. 21  —  Softening the blow of a monthly price hike, Disney is offering subscribers to Hulu's live TV service access to Disney+ and ESPN+ at no extra charge.
Tim Starks / CyberScoop:
US regulators approve a rule requiring banks to report cyberattacks that disrupt operations or impact the US financial system within 36 hours, starting May 2022  —  Banks must report major cybersecurity incidents to federal officials within 36 hours under a rule that U.S. financial regulators finalized on Thursday.
Michelle F Davis / Bloomberg:
Benchling, which makes cloud-based software to manage biotech R&D, raises a $100M Series F at a $6.1B valuation; Benchling was last valued at $4B in April  —  - New investor Franklin Templeton leads round with Altimeter  — Companies using firm's software include Regeneron, Eli Lilly
Gilad Edelman / Wired:
Q&A with Integrity Institute's Jeff Allen on how Facebook's algorithm gives preference to engagement baiting, and how to address that from a design perspective  —  Jeff Allen, cofounder of the Integrity Institute and a former data scientist at Facebook, says social media companies need missions beyond “giving everyone a voice.”
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic:
A writer created a politically bland Facebook profile to test the app's algorithm for extreme content, and ended up being shown low-quality, clickbait posts  —  In 2019, a researcher at Facebook conducted an experiment to see whether the platform really has a tendency to send users …

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