Techmeme
August 24, 2021, 3:45 AM

Top News

Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Instagram says it's retiring the swipe-up link feature, which allows users to visit external links by swiping up, in favor of tappable stickers starting Aug. 30  —  The swipe-up will be no more.  Instagram is planning to retire the feature, which allows people to visit external webpages by swiping up …
Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
Researchers find 1,000+ web apps, from Ford, American Airlines, and others, mistakenly exposed 38M records stored on Microsoft's Power Apps service  —  Misconfigured Power Apps from Microsoft led to more than a thousand web apps accessible to anyone who found them.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Tim Cook and Satya Nadella plan to attend a meeting with Joe Biden on Wednesday to discuss efforts by private companies to improve cybersecurity  —  Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella plan to attend a White House meeting with President Joe Biden …
Igor Bonifacic / Engadget:
Poly Network says it has now recovered all of $610M in cryptocurrencies it lost to a hacker, and is in the process of returning them to their rightful owners  —  One of the most unusual cryptocurrency heists in recent memory has come to a close.  On Monday, Poly Network …
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Facebook is running a test in the US to bring voice and video calling back to the main Facebook app, to reduce the need to jump between Facebook and Messenger  —  - New test will bring Messenger technology back into Facebook  —  Facebook Inc. is bringing voice and video calling …
Turner Wright / Cointelegraph:
Substack begins accepting bitcoin as payment for subscriptions, initially for a few crypto publications, using payments processor OpenNode  —  Substack has more than 500,000 paid subscribers, but Bitcoin payments will first be available to “a select group of crypto-focused publications.”
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
After criticism, Centre, the consortium founded by Circle and Coinbase, says it will exclusively back its USDC stablecoin reserves with cash and US treasuries  —  - Digital currency company Circle says it's changing the makeup of its dollar-pegged stablecoin USD Coin to just cash and U.S. Treasury bonds.
Android Developers Blog:
Google says it will make app ratings on the Play Store more personalized by localizing by users' country from November 2021 and device type from early 2022  —  Ratings and reviews are important.  They provide valuable quantitative and qualitative feedback on your users' reported experience …
Reuters:
Report: Didi has suspended plans to launch in the UK and Europe for at least a year, amid a regulatory backlash in China over data privacy  —  China's ride-hailing giant Didi Global Inc (DIDI.N) has suspended its plans to launch in Britain and continental Europe, The Telegraph reported on Monday …
Varsha Bansal / Rest of World:
A look at the decade long struggle to bring the script of Tulu, an Indian language, into Unicode, and the problem of keeping languages alive in the digital age  —  For 10 years, experts have tried to bring Tulu to smartphones.  But they can't agree on how.  —  • BENGALURU, INDIA
Nicole LaPorte / Fast Company:
Profile of Invisible Universe, which is developing animated franchises using characters born on social media with the help of influencers like Serena Williams  —  Last week, Realqaiqai, the Instagram handle for Qai Qai (pronounced “kway kway"), the doll turned social media star belonging to Olympia Ohanian …
Reuters:
JD.com reports net revenue of $39.14B in Q2, up 26% YoY, beating estimates, and added a record 32M users over the quarter amid ongoing regulatory tightening  —  Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com Inc on Monday told investors they do not expect any business impact from a wave …
Packy McCormick / Not Boring:
An in-depth look at Solana blockchain project: $0.0001/transaction and 65,000 transactions/second, well ahead of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and a $21.2B market cap  —  The $21B Blockchain and the Arrow of Time … Today's essay, the whole thing, is brought to you by... Solana  —  Hi friends 👋,
Gillian Tan / Bloomberg:
Nigerian mobile payments service OPay raises $400M led by Vision Fund 2 at a $2B valuation, marking SoftBank's first investment in Africa  —  - Sequoia Capital China and Redpoint China also participated  — Investment marks Vision Fund 2's first bet in Africa

Sponsor Posts

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:
CIO challenge 6: Can we find an effective solution that also minimizes operational costs?  —  Welcome to the next and final installment of our CIO series!  After what feels like a thousand cups of coffee …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Leaderboards:
Discover the top reporters on AI, VR, policy, and much more  —  We've analyzed Techmeme's news crawl to identify the most influential and prolific writers on 48 news topics.  Download reports immediately for just $100.
Techmeme Ride Home:
(BNS) How To Know When To Kill Your Startup
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 3:45 AM ET, August 24, 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

New York Times:
Patrick Klepek / VICE:
Ben Lovejoy / 9to5Mac:
Yogita Khatri / The Block:

Earlier Picks

Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Sami Fathi / MacRumors: