Techmeme
June 30, 2021, 12:50 AM

Top News

Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Microsoft and OpenAI announce GitHub Copilot, an AI-based tool to recommend code to software developers in almost any programming language  —  - GitHub, GitHub's parent company Microsoft and OpenAI have teamed up to deliver a tool that comes up with source code for programmers to use as they work.
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Twitter says it fixed a bug that caused some users to lose access to its “Latest” chronological feed option on its web application  —  Update: Twitter's Kayvon Beykpour says this is a bug that it's working on fixing.  The Twitter Support account says the fix is rolled out.
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
Facebook unveils Bulletin, its Substack newsletter competitor, but is not yet accepting signups and says it won't take a cut of creators' revenue “at launch”  —  Facebook won't take a cut ‘at launch’  —  Facebook is getting into the subscription newsletter game.
Madeleine Hodson / PrivacySharks:
Data on 700M LinkedIn users for sale on a forum, with info like names, addresses, inferred salary; LinkedIn says it seems some of the data is from other sources  —  Things are not looking good for LinkedIn right now.  Just two months after a jaw-dropping 500 million profiles from the networking site …
Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post:
GAO report finds 20 out of 42 federal agencies surveyed use facial recognition tech and sheds light on how deeply the tech is integrated into federal agencies  —  Black Lives Matter protesters, Jan. 6 rioters and regular travelers are among those targeted by agencies using the tech, including the IRS and the Postal Service
Scott Rosenberg / Axios:
Dismissals of FTC and state AGs suits against Facebook shows the difficulty of making antitrust charges stick and could spur lawmakers to toughen antitrust laws  —  A federal judge's decisions Monday tossed out antitrust lawsuits against Facebook — and threw cold water on the heated campaign …
New York Times:
The mounting legal and regulatory scrutiny of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google has led to a growing demand for lawyers who work in corporate competition law  —  Not since the government sued to break up Microsoft in the late 1990s has there been greater demand for people who know the ins and outs of corporate competition law.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Shopify drops Shopify App Store's cut to 0% on devs' first $1M in revenue, says app developer partners earned $233M in 2020, more than 2018 and 2019 combined  —  Following similar moves by Apple, Google, and more recently Amazon, among others, e-commerce platform Shopify announced today it's …
Allison Johnson / The Verge:
Bloomberg:
Worldcoin, cofounded by Sam Altman, raises $25M, plans a cryptocurrency belonging to all people on earth, and is making a device to ID recipients via iris scan  —  Sam Altman has a new startup that intends to give a special type of cryptocurrency to every person on earth.
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
After hackers wiped many of Western Digital's My Book Live devices, a look at the code suggests the manufacturer had removed authentication code  —  Western Digital removed code that would have prevented the wiping of petabytes of data.  —  Update 6/29/2021, 9:00 PM: Western Digital …
Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
Neeva, a $4.95/month ad-free search engine from two ex-Google executives, launches after raising $77.5M  —  Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan helped turn Google into an ad giant.  Now they're starting over with a service whose only customers are its users.  —  A new search engine?
The Information:
Source: Apple is on track to spend ~$300M on Google Cloud storage services in 2021, up ~50% from 2020, dwarfing ByteDance, Spotify, and other large customers  —  Apple executives have taken swipes at Google in the past over its privacy practices.  But the iPhone maker trusts Google enough …
Shara Tibken / CNET:
Studies have found that certain neighborhoods across the US that were redlined in the past are the same areas without fast home internet service today  —  Communities that couldn't get mortgage loans in the 1940s are the same areas without fast home internet service today.  There's no easy fix.
Tiffany Hsu / New York Times:
Outbrain files for an IPO aiming to raise over $100M, says it had $767M in revenue last year, $4.4M in net income, and funnels ads to 7,000+ websites like CNN  —  Outbrain, one of the top purveyors of clickbait ads, filed on Tuesday to raise at least $100 million through an initial public offering …
Tweets: @quinnypig and @caseynewton
Bloomberg:
Sources: amid escalating rivalry, neither Google nor Microsoft are keen to renew a recently expired truce to not use their lobbying firepower against each other  —  A non-aggression pact forged by their CEOs expired in April, threatening to add fuel to industry's antitrust battles
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Instagram says it is running a small test that lets any user share links in their Stories through a sticker  —  Now with a linking sticker  —  Instagram has always limited who can post swipe-up links to their stories, but today, the company is starting a new test that could widen that ability.
Dan Seifert / The Verge:
Amazon debuts Reading Sidekick, which reads physical and digital books aloud from a catalog of over 700, for Kids Plus on Fire tablets and Echo devices  —  Reading Sidekick is available on Echo devices starting today  —  Amazon has announced a new feature for its Kids Plus service …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch:
Forum Brands, which provides market intelligence for e-commerce acquisitions, raises $27M Series A led by Norwest Venture Partners  —  The number of startups acquiring e-commerce businesses, especially those operating on Amazon, to grow and scale is increasing as more people than ever are shopping online.
More: WebWire and BestgamingproThanks:@vscpr

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