Techmeme
April 18, 2022, 11:00 PM

Top News

Matt Levine / Bloomberg:
A look at corporate raider tactics requiring 51% of a company's stock, which tend to treat remaining minority shareholders poorly, amid Twitter's “poison pill”  —  Poison pills  —  Here are some things you could do 1 :  — Buy 51% of the stock of a public company …
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
To unlock its vast potential, Twitter should go private and split into two companies: one for the service and social graph and one for its apps and ad business  —  Elon Musk wrote in a letter to Twitter's board: … The vast majority of commentary about the Musk-Twitter saga has focused …
Reed Albergotti / Washington Post:
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Apple employees unionizing at Grand Central Terminal store want a $30/hour minimum pay, tuition reimbursement, more vacation time, and better retirement options  —  - Workers organizing a union at Apple's Grand Central Terminal store are seeking minimum pay of $30 per hour.
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
A US appeals court reaffirms that scraping publicly accessible content on the internet is legal, ending a landmark case LinkedIn brought against rival Hiq Labs  —  Good news for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists: scraping publicly accessible data is legal, according to a U.S. appeals court ruling.
Ronan Farrow / New Yorker:
An in-depth investigation into the $12B spyware industry, dominated by Israel's NSO Group, as Citizen Lab finds Pegasus infected a device in the UK's No. 10  —  The inside story of the world's most notorious commercial spyware and the big tech companies waging war against it.
The Citizen Lab:
An investigation finds 65+ Catalans were targeted by Pegasus or Candiru, likely by Spanish authorities, and details Homage, a new iOS zero-click used by NSO  —  Key Findings  — The Citizen Lab, in collaboration with Catalan civil society groups, has identified at least 65 individuals targeted or infected with mercenary spyware.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Code on Twitter's site reveals how an upcoming Edit button could work: by making a new tweet with the updated content and listing the old tweets before the edit  —  This month, Twitter announced the ground-shaking news that it was actually going to offer users a way to edit tweets — a longtime user request.
Stacey Higginbotham / Stacey on IoT:
Smart home and IoT company Insteon seemingly shuts down as home hubs suddenly stop working and LinkedIn profiles of top executives show their roles have ended  —  Is your Insteon smart home system down?  I'm getting reports from dozens of Insteon users that as of Friday their smart home hubs have stopped working.
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Report: Microsoft is working on a program to let select brands advertise within free-to-play Xbox games, such as on a billboard, and won't take a revenue cut  —  The ads supposedly wouldn't disrupt gameplay  —  Microsoft is reportedly working on a program that will let brands showcase …
Taylor Locke / Fortune:
Moonbirds, an NFT collection of digital owls by Kevin Rose's Proof Collective, a group of 1K NFT collectors whose membership costs ~$285K, made $281M+ in sales  —  Never miss a story: Follow your favorite topics and authors to get a personalized email with the journalism that matters most to you.

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Featured Podcasts

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The Upstarts Podcast:
The $1.4B Startup Deciding What You See When You Shop Online | Sequen's Zoë Weil
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Channels with Peter Kafka:
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Zach Reitano - Building Ro and Why Healthcare Should Be 50% of GDP
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Earlier Picks

Ignacio Olivera Doll / Bloomberg:
Michael McSweeney / The Block: