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Techmeme
January 20, 2021, 8:35 PM
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Top News

Taylor Soper / GeekWire:
Amazon says it wants to help the Biden administration's vaccination efforts, says non-WFH Amazon staff should be vaccinated “at the earliest appropriate time”  —  Amazon says it is ready to turn its facilities into COVID-19 vaccination sites and is offering other resources to the U.S. government.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
Valve and five PC video game publishers have been fined a total of €7.8M for restricting cross-border game sales in EU's Digital Single Market  —  ZeniMax, Capcom, and Bandai Namco were among the publishers fined  —  Valve and five PC video game publishers have been fined a total of €7.8 million …
Mitchell Clark / The Verge:
The Biden administration updates WhiteHouse.gov with several new accessibility features, including dark mode, a large text mode, and more  —  From dark times to dark mode  —  The official website of the White House, WhiteHouse.gov, has been completely replaced with a new version …
Bloomberg:
Jack Ma has resurfaced after months out of public view, addressing teachers on an online conference, quashing intense speculation about his fate  —  Alibaba and Ant co-founder Jack Ma has resurfaced after months out of public view, quashing intense speculation about the plight …
Drew FitzGerald / Wall Street Journal:
Interview with Ajit Pai, who outlasted many senior officials in the Trump administration, on 5G, internet access, and FCC's independence over his tenure  —  Ajit Pai says he focused on fostering investment while maintaining independence  —  Ajit Pai's four years atop the Federal Communications …
Richard Lawler / Engadget:
Donald Trump pardons ex-Waymo and Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski; Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey were among those supporting a pardon for Levandowski  —  Last year Anthony Levandowski pleaded guilty to one count of stealing materials from Google, where he was an engineer for its self-driving car efforts …
Ina Fried / Axios:
Google is investigating why Margaret Mitchell, who helps lead its ethical AI team, downloaded and shared a large number of files with people outside the company  —  Google is investigating recent actions by Margaret Mitchell, who helps lead the company's ethical AI team, Axios has confirmed.
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Opera acquires YoYo Games for $10M and launches Opera Gaming division to monetize its gaming efforts; Opera GX gaming browser had 7M MAUs in Dec., up 350% YoY  —  Web browser maker Opera has acquired YoYo Games, maker of the GameMaker Studio 2 game engine, for $10 million, and it has also launched its Opera Gaming division.
Rob Walker / Marker:
An in-depth look at the PDF file format, a staple since the 1990s, as Adobe says 303B PDFs were opened using its services in FY2020, a 17% rise YoY  —  How has the low-fi 30-year-old innovation reigned for so long?  —  When is the last time you downloaded, opened, printed, or created a good old-fashioned PDF?
Dan De Luce / NBC News:
USAGM CEO Michael Pack, who oversaw the Open Technology Fund, has resigned at the request of the Biden administration  —  WASHINGTON — The Trump appointee overseeing the Voice of America and other U.S.-funded broadcasters resigned on Wednesday at the request of the Biden administration …
Mallory Hackett / MobiHealthNews:
Oregon-based virtual healthcare startup Conversa has added $8M to its Series B after raising $12M last June, bringing its total raised to $34M  —  The automated care platform has been deployed at several health systems to remotely monitor, analyze and communicate with patients across a range of conditions.
More: TechCrunch
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Brave becomes the first major browser to natively support IPFS protocol, useful for accessing censored content; Wikipedia and other sites offer IPFS versions  —  Brave users will now be able to seamlessly access ipfs:// links.  —  With the release of Brave 1.19 today …
Lauren Feiner / CNBC:
Netflix reports Q4 revenue of $6.64B vs. $6.63B est., up 21.5% YoY, and global streaming paid memberships of 203.7M, up 8.5M vs. 6.5M est.; stock up 16%+  —  - Netflix reported fourth quarter 2020 earnings Tuesday that beat analyst expectations on revenue and net subscriber additions but fell below EPS estimates.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Netflix says its “Shuffle Play” feature, which lets Netflix's algorithm choose what you watch next, will roll out globally to all users in H1 2021
Eric Newcomer / Newcomer:
A look at a16z's communication efforts over the years, as the firm expands its own media operations and has largely stopped cooperating with reporters  —  Why media whisperer Margit Wennmachers is going direct.  —  Benedict Evans, Andreessen Horowitz's former in-house analyst …
Zoë Bernard / The Information:
Sources: Andreessen Horowitz to launch an opinion section on its website that will publish articles related to technology and business from outside contributors

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 8:35 PM ET, January 20, 2021.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

David Folkenflik / NPR:
Public broadcasting officials plan to go to DC today to convince lawmakers to keep their funding; Indiana cut all taxpayer funding for its 17 public stations

Mark Stenberg / Adweek:
The WSJ has launched two new paid executive membership programs, which cater to highly senior executives and include access to summits, roundtables, and more

Austin Fuller / Current:
NSF canceled a five-year, $1.2M grant for climate reporting to IndiJ Public Media in April and a PBS grant, though the majority of it was already spent

More News

Varsha Bansal / WIRED UK:
A look at the aggressive recovery methods used by dodgy loan apps plaguing the Play Store in India, including social shaming, primarily via WhatsApp groups
Jennifer Smith / Wall Street Journal:
Aurora partners with truck maker PACCAR to develop self-driving big rig trucks “in the next several years”, as it closes the deal for Uber's self-driving unit
Alexandra Alper / Reuters:
Trump signs an executive order that seeks to thwart foreign use of cloud computing products or services for malicious cyber operations against the US

Earlier Picks

Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Malwarebytes says it was hacked by group that breached SolarWinds, via Azure and Office 365 exploits, but attackers only accessed a subset of internal emails
Meagan Simpson / BetaKit:
South Korean search engine company Naver Corp. has acquired online self-publishing platform Wattpad for an estimated ~$600M
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Q&A with Instagram head Adam Mosseri on keeping users safe at scale, content moderation, Facebook's actions against Trump, future regulation, Reels, and more
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
FireEye releases a free tool that audits networks to determine whether certain techniques, known to be employed by SolarWinds hackers, were used
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