Techmeme
January 31, 2021, 7:05 PM

Top News

Cat Ferguson / MIT Technology Review:
VAMS, a CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M to manage rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, has been abandoned by states due to bugs and problems  —  The CDC ordered software that was meant to manage the vaccine rollout.  Instead, it has been plagued by problems and abandoned by most states.
Dave Lee / Financial Times:
More than 2,000 police and fire departments in the US have now partnered with Amazon's Ring, with 1,189 new departments added over the past year  —  Controversial surveillance network has doubled in size in the country in the past year  —  More than 2,000 police and fire departments in the US …
Kashmir Hill / New York Times:
How one disgruntled person destroyed the online reputations of 145+ people, aided by “complaint sites” in the US and platforms like Google that rarely intervene  —  Outrageous lies destroyed Guy Babcock's online reputation.  When he went hunting for their source, what he discovered was worse than he could have imagined.
Kellen Browning / New York Times:
League of Legends teams in the US recruited 40+ superstar players from Asia since 2016, with an average salary of $460K for a player in a team's starting five  —  League of Legends teams in the U.S. lag behind their competitors in Asia, so they recruit the world's best players by offering huge salaries.
Corbin Davenport / Android Police:
Google has reinstated federated chat app Element on the Play Store after briefly pulling it over abusive content, which is now removed, on Element's servers  —  Element is a popular client for the federated chat protocol Matrix, and we highlighted it in our roundup of the best open-source alternatives …
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Canalys: a record 11.2M Chromebooks were shipped in Q4 2020, up 287% YoY, with Lenovo Chromebooks up 1,766%; in 2020, 30.7M Chromebooks were shipped, up 109%  —  COVID-19 has had a lot of negative effects on the market, but it's been great for the PC market as millions of people transitioned to working and learning from home.
Evelyn Douek / Lawfare:
Analysis of the first Oversight Board rulings, which in the long term may influence Facebook moderation rules more than the upcoming decision on Trump ban  —  After seemingly endless announcements heralding the arrival of the Facebook Oversight Board (FOB) over the past 18 months, the board has …
Maggie Miller / The Hill:
A look at the criticism in DC directed at CSET, a State Dept. bureau focused on cybersecurity and emerging technologies formed in the last days of Trump's admin  —  A newly established State Department bureau focused on cybersecurity and emerging technologies could give the Biden administration …
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
SetSail raises $26M Series A for its service that recommends when to pay salespeople, by monitoring the progress of sales across CRM, email, and other systems  —  SetSail wants to upend the way sales people get compensated by paying them throughout the sales cycle, rather than a single commission after the sale closes.
Under the Hood:
Robinhood explains why it placed restrictions on certain securities over the past week, says its clearinghouse-mandated deposit for equities increased tenfold  —  With the extraordinary market activity this week, and the temporary restrictions we put in place on certain securities …
John Herrman / New York Times:

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Zeyi Yang / Protocol:

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Lara O'Reilly / Business Insider: