Techmeme
December 21, 2020, 12:35 AM

Top News

Daisuke Wakabayashi / New York Times:
Profile of Dina Srinivasan, who is helping Texas AG's antitrust investigation of Google after her treatises on Facebook and Google reframed antitrust thinking  —  Regulators are relying on insiders like Dina Srinivasan, who left her digital ad job after concluding that “Facebook and Google …
Andrés Arrieta / Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Facebook is attacking privacy with its anti-Apple campaign and has locked SMBs into a surveillance-powered advertising model that's invasive of customers  —  Facebook has recently launched a campaign touting itself as the protector of small businesses.  This is a laughable attempt from Facebook …
Matt Stoller / BIG:
Google and Facebook may continue predatory behavior for years as antitrust cases play out, which can be deterred by filing criminal charges against their execs  —  Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai need to be indicted.  —  1 hr ago  —  Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly and finance.
Rob Copeland / Wall Street Journal:
Profile of Kent Walker, Google's chief legal officer and SVP of global affairs who helped it fend off antitrust probes in 10+ countries including India and UK  —  With antitrust challenges intensifying, longtime executive Kent Walker is now big man on company campus
The Citizen Lab:
Citizen Lab: NSO's zero-day, zero-click exploit chain, active in at least iOS 13.5.1, was used to hack ~36 Al Jazeera reporters via iMessage in summer of 2020  —  Summary & Key Findings  — In July and August 2020, government operatives used NSO Group's Pegasus spyware …
Microsoft Security:
Microsoft details the Solorigate DLL file that was used to install a backdoor in SolarWinds Orion and reveals it discovered additional malware affecting Orion  —  - Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team  — Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC)  —  We, along with the security industry …
Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
Wall Street Journal:
Michael Steeber / 9to5Mac:
Apple has closed nearly 100 stores globally since December 14, including in London, California, and Tennessee, as COVID-19 cases surge  —  New COVID-19 restrictions and worsening outbreaks have compelled Apple to temporarily close nearly one fifth of its retail stores during one of the busiest shopping weeks of the holiday season.
Owen Thomas / San Francisco Chronicle:
Profile of Bret Taylor, Salesforce's new COO and the architect of its $27.7B acquisition of Slack, who might one day succeed Marc Benioff as CEO of the company  —  Everyone in Silicon Valley seems to know Bret Taylor.  —  Few outside do.  —  That's going to change, as the software engineer …
Lingling Wei / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: in an early November meeting, Jack Ma offered concessions to Chinese regulators, including handing over parts of Ant Group if “the country needs it”  —  Trying to salvage his relationship with regulators in a Nov. 2 meeting, the Chinese billionaire said he was ready to do what the country needed
Katie Bo Williams / Defense One:
WH officials propose ending the “dual-hat” leadership arrangement of NSA and Cyber Command, renewing debate over splitting up the agencies amid recent attacks  —  An end to the “dual hat” arrangement has been debated for years — but the timing raises questions.
Ilya Khrennikov / Bloomberg:
JetBrains, maker of the language Kotlin, which never raised any VC funding is now valued at an estimated $7B, and says it will have $200M in revenue this year  —  - Google picked JetBrains for key coding language for Android  — Founders shunned VCs, bootstrapped to billion-dollar fortunes
Jacob Knutson / Axios:
Trump downplayed the massive cyberattack on the US government, claiming that China may be responsible and the “Fake News Media” is exaggerating its extent  —  President Trump downplayed a massive cyberattack on U.S. government departments and agencies and private companies on Twitter Saturday …
Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:
Associated Press:

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