Techmeme
November 19, 2021, 12:25 PM

Top News

Abram Brown / Forbes:
ConstitutionDAO loses Sotheby's US Constitution auction to an undisclosed winner's $43.2M bid, after crowdfunding over $40M  —  This story has been updated to reflect the full price that the Constitution sold for after all auction fees.  —  A rare copy of the U.S. Constitution sold …
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
Shannon Bond / NPR:
Meta says it's looking at how users from marginalized communities experience its products and releases a paper on changes to how it uses US demographic data  —  The parent company of Facebook and Instagram is looking into whether its platforms treat users differently based on race …
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
In a staff email, Phil Spencer says he's evaluating Xbox's relationship with Activision Blizzard and will make adjustments; PlayStation head sent a similar note  —  Microsoft Corp.'s head of Xbox said he's “evaluating all aspects of our relationship with Activision Blizzard …
Wall Street Journal:
A bipartisan coalition of state AGs from CA, FL, KY, MA, NE, NJ, NY, TN, and VT is investigating how Instagram attracts and affects young people  —  Move raises pressure on parent company Meta Platforms, formerly called Facebook, over the potential harms to its users
The Information:
Sources: Facebook is offering musicians and celebrities, via production companies, payments to host Live Audio Rooms; source says up to $50K per session  —  Facebook is offering to pay musicians and other celebrities tens of thousands of dollars to host sessions on its new live audio feature …
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.
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!
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
MediaTek announces the Dimensity 9000 mobile chip, which uses TSMC's 4nm process and supports 5G without the faster mmWave standard, WiFi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3  —  MediaTek's new SoC is its most powerful yet  —  MediaTek has just announced its latest flagship processor: the Dimensity 9000 …
Dallas Morning News:
Texas Instruments plans to build as many as four semiconductor wafer fabs in Texas, with production starting by 2025 and a potential total investment of ~$30B  —  The site has the potential to house up to four semiconductor chip manufacturing plants.  —  Dallas-based Texas Instruments …
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 …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Flytrex, which is working with Walmart and others on a drone-based delivery service in North Carolina, raises a $40M Series C, bringing total funding to $60M  —  Flytrex, the Israeli startup working with Walmart, Chilli's, and others in North Carolina in pilots for a drone-based delivery …
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