Techmeme
February 7, 2021, 12:45 PM

Top News

New York Times:
Leaked cellphone data from the siege at the Capitol demonstrates how advertising IDs can be used to identify and track the movement of specific individuals  —  Times Opinion was able to identify individuals from a trove of leaked smartphone location data.  —  Mr. Warzel and Mr. Thompson are writers in Opinion.
Julian Chokkattu / Wired:
A look at Metalenz, which aims to replace multiple lens elements in smartphone cameras with a single lens system that utilizes optical metasurfaces technology  —  The optics in your smartphone have been pretty much the same for more than a decade.  That's about to change.
Will Oremus / OneZero :
Unlike established social media platforms, Clubhouse is built to replicate real world social structures, norms, and status hierarchies rather than collapse them  —  The hot new social app has found success by replicating real-world social structures rather than exploding them
Mark Stenberg / Medialyte:
Karen Hao / MIT Technology Review:
Study of 130+ facial recognition data sets compiled over 43 years: driven by ML's data needs, researchers gradually abandoned asking for people's consent  —  The largest ever study of facial-recognition data shows how much the rise of deep learning has fueled a loss of privacy.  —  hide
Jon Fingas / Engadget:
As protests grow in Myanmar, NetBlocks says the country's internet connectivity fell to 16% of ordinary levels, indicating a near-total internet shutdown  —  Myanmar's military leaders are extending their  —  internet restrictions in a bid to limit protests against their coup.
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Washington Post:
Jody Williams, the owner of TheDonald's domain name, explains why he pulled the plug on the pro-Trump forum that became a staging ground for the Capitol attack  —  The Army veteran, a site moderator who owned its domain, watched with growing alarm as racism, threats and QAnon references flourished on the pro-Trump site.
Ashley Gold / Axios:
Microsoft suspends contributions for the rest of the 2022 election cycle to all members of Congress who voted to object to the presidential election results  —  Microsoft announced Friday it will suspend contributions for the rest of the 2022 election cycle to all members of Congress who voted …
Adam Ciralsky / Vanity Fair:
Profile of BitMEX cofounder Arthur Hayes, who remains at large after the CFTC filed a suit against BitMEX for allegedly running an unregistered trading platform  —  The BitMEX cofounder created a cryptocurrency exchange that has traded trillions.  Now he's wanted by U.S. authorities …
Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal:
Andy Jassy is said to be “warmer and fuzzier” than Bezos, but as Amazon's next CEO, he faces many hurdles if he wants its tech to manage workers more humanely  —  One secret of Amazon's ability to grow rapidly: software and algorithms that manage its millions of employees and marketplace sellers …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: CEO of Robinhood, which had 20M users in 2020 and recently raised $3.4B, told investors that he still plans to take the company public in H1 2021  —  The firm that set out to bring investing to the masses has run into the reality of Wall Street regulations

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More News

Kaveh Waddell / Consumer Reports:
Andy Greenberg / Wired:

Earlier Picks

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