Techmeme
April 9, 2021, 12:20 PM

Top News

Kellen / Droid Life:
Epic filing reveals that in a 2016 email Phil Schiller said “moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us”, which Epic argues is proof of lock-in  —  Epic and Apple are preparing to battle it out in court over the App Store (remember that whole Fortnite debacle?) …
Patrick McGee / Financial Times:
Filipe Espósito / 9to5Mac:
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Amazon wins enough votes to beat union effort in Alabama; of the 3,215 ballots cast, there were 1,798 votes opposing the union and 738 votes in favor  —  - With more than two thirds of the ballots counted, Amazon on Friday secured enough votes to defeat the unionization drive at one of its Alabama warehouses.
The Markup:
Investigation finds Google uses a secret blocklist to stop advertisers from making YouTube ad campaigns for hate terms; it worked less than a third of the time  —  Many well-known White supremacist and White nationalist terms and slogans were not blocked  —  First of two parts.
Kim Lyons / The Verge:
Verizon is recalling 2.5M Ellipsis Jetpack mobile hotspots, ~1.3M of which are in use, after investigation found batteries could overheat and pose fire hazards  —  The CPSC says the devices' batteries are the source of the overheating  —  Verizon said Thursday it is working …
Katie Canales / Insider:
Report: hackers scraped data of 500M LinkedIn users and posted it for sale online; LinkedIn confirms the dataset includes publicly viewable info from its site  —  - Personal data from 500 million LinkedIn users has been scraped and is reportedly for sale on a hacking forum.
Will Gottsegen / Decrypt:
Robinhood says 9.5 million customers traded crypto on its platform in Q1 2021 compared to 1.7 million in Q4 2020, an increase of 458%  —  The online brokerage service Robinhood said on Thursday that 9.5 million of its customers traded cryptocurrency on its platform in Q1 of 2021.
Derrek Lee / Android Central:
Sources: Google has canceled its rumored mid-range phone Pixel 5a due to the global chip shortage  —  Pixel 5a, we hardly knew ya.  —  What you need to know  — The rumored Google Pixel 5a has reportedly been canceled.  — Apparently, the global chip shortage has affected its production.
New York Times:
Taiwan is going to great lengths to keep water flowing to chip factories of TSMC and others, including shutting off irrigation to legions of rice growers  —  The island is going to great lengths to keep water flowing to its all-important semiconductor industry, including shutting off irrigation to legions of rice growers.
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Amid a mental health crisis because of COVID-19, Stanford researchers found that most tech platforms have no policies related to discussions of self-harm  —  Exclusive: Amid a rising mental health crisis, Stanford researchers find many companies ignoring posts about self-harm
Sahil Patel / Wall Street Journal:
Community, which lets public figures, media outlets, and brands text with fans, raises $40M from Salesforce Ventures, bringing its total raised to $90M  —  The platform for brands and celebrities seeks to expand to more large marketers and small businesses  —  Community.com Inc. …
More: Variety
Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:
Iyuno-SDI Group, whose software offers media localization services like subtitles, dubbing, and accessibility features, raises $160M from SoftBank Vision 2  —  Iyuno-SDI Group, a provider of translated subtitles and other media localization services, announced today it has raised $160 million in funding from SoftBank Vision 2.
Amanda Macias / CNBC:
US Commerce Department adds seven Chinese supercomputing entities to an export blacklist for allegedly building supercomputers used by Chinese military  —  - Commerce added seven Chinese supercomputing entities to a U.S. economic blacklist citing national security concerns.

Sponsor Posts

Meta:
Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few  —  Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.
Tribe AI:
Build AI products that matter  —  Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact.  We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.
Zoho:
5 common accounting mistakes  —  This is a guest post by Yaali Bizappln Solutions.  A lot of businesses manage their customers and finances on separate platforms.  This disconnect often leads to missed invoices …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Mon. 11/25 - Return Of The Vita?
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:20 PM ET, April 9, 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.

More News

R. Lawler / Engadget:
Elizabeth Dwoskin / Washington Post:
Luke Plunkett / Kotaku:

Earlier Picks

David Priest / CNET:
Matt Mullenweg:
Ian Carlos Campbell / The Verge:
James Vincent / The Verge:
Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch:
Max Chafkin / Bloomberg: