Techmeme
December 14, 2020, 9:05 AM

Top News

Dustin Volz / Wall Street Journal:
Source: Treasury's hackers used a flaw in a SolarWinds product; SolarWinds, which touts 300K+ customers, says the flaw was the result of a “supply chain attack”  —  Russia's foreign intelligence service is suspected of being behind effort to breach government networks
Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:
Sources: state-backed Russian hacking group APT29, or Cozy Bear, is behind the hacks of US Treasury, NTIA, and FireEye  —  The Russian government hackers who breached a top cybersecurity firm are behind a global espionage campaign that also compromised the Treasury and Commerce departments …
Christopher Bing / Reuters:
Sources: state sponsored hackers monitored internal emails at US Treasury and broke into National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Office 365  —  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A sophisticated hacking group backed by a foreign government stole information from the U.S. Treasury Department …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Google says Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, and other Google services suffered a worldwide outage for about an hour for a majority of users on Monday  —  Update: It looks like services are slowly starting to come back again.  We've contacted Google for a statement about what happened.
Ben Smith / New York Times:
Sources: Apple TV+ was making Scraper, a show about Gawker Media, with several episodes written, then Tim Cook sent an email about it and the project was killed  —  Big tech companies now exert huge influence over what stories get told.  The message is clear: Be careful who you offend.
Upvoted:
Reddit announces it has acquired short-form video app and TikTok rival Dubsmash  —  Reddit is where passionate communities come together for authentic exchanges about the topics that matter to them.  Video is increasingly core to how people want to connect, and as we continue to grow our community …
Daisuke Wakabayashi / New York Times:
Internal memo: Google now plans to have employees return to office in September 2021 and is testing a flexible model of three days in office, two days WFH  —  The Silicon Valley company now plans to have employees return to the office in September.  It will be different when they get there.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Facebook fears cracking down on Hindu extremist groups in India because of the likelihood that it could lead to violence toward its staff  —  Social media giant's security team cites possible attacks if extremist Hindu groups are kicked off platform
New York Times:
In H1 2020, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft spent ~$23M on EU lobbying, equal to what they declared for all of 2019 and up from ~$8.3M in 2014  —  Silicon Valley is building a powerful influence industry in Brussels, which has “never seen this kind of money” spent this way.
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
EA says it has agreed to buy British racing game developer Codemasters for $1.2B, outbidding Take-Two, which had agreed on a $971M acquisition last month  —  - The deal upstaged a previous transaction agreed between rival publisher Take-Two Interactive and Codemasters.
Samantha Cole / VICE:
Pornhub says it has removed all videos from unverified accounts from its platform; the number of hosted videos dropped from 13.5M to 7.2M  —  After changing its policies to ban unverified uploaders and Mastercard and Visa's decision to drop the platform entirely, Pornhub announced that it has removed all unverified videos.

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Earlier Picks

Rakesh Prakash / Times of India: