Techmeme
August 26, 2021, 4:35 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: TSMC plans to increase prices by ~10% for advanced chips and ~20% for less advanced chips, starting later this year or early next  —  TSMC to increase prices of most advanced chips by roughly 10%; less advanced chips will cost about 20% more  —  The world's largest contract chip maker …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Apple launches News Partner Program, which lowers commissions on in-app purchases to 15% for news publishers who participate in Apple News  —  Apple today is launching a new program that will allow subscription news organizations that participate in the Apple News app and meet certain requirements …
Wall Street Journal:
Q&A with John Binns, a 21-year-old American living in Turkey, who claims responsibility for the recent T-Mobile hack and says its security is “awful”  —  A 21-year-old American said he used an unprotected router to access millions of customer records in the mobile carrier's latest breach
Joan E. Solsman / CNET:
Netflix is testing games in its Android app in Poland, starting with two existing Stranger Things games  —  Playing on Netflix's mobile app is new, but the games themselves — two pixelated Stranger Things games — have already been available off Netflix for years.
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Internal corporate directory shows Microsoft has hired 15-year AWS veteran Charlie Bell as a corporate VP  —  - Charlie Bell is listed as a corporate vice president under Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft's human-resources chief  — Bell left Amazon recently after 15 years in a top leadership position at Amazon Web Services.
Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:
A history of Google's messaging apps and how a lack of any kind of top-down messaging leadership has led to a decade and a half of failed messaging platforms  —  Sixteen years after the launch of Google Talk, Google messaging is still a mess.  —  Google Talk, Google's first-ever instant messaging platform …
Lauren Feiner / CNBC:
After White House meeting, Google will spend $10B over five years and train 100K IT and data workers, Apple pledges supply chain security improvements, and more  —  - The White House hosted a cybersecurity summit with CEOs in sectors ranging from tech to insurance.
Alex Hern / The Guardian:
UK government says it will move away from EU's GDPR after Brexit, including possibly ending cookie consent popups, and names John Edwards as preferred ICO head  —  Culture secretary says move could lead to an end to irritating cookie popups and consent requests online
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
A look at the small team behind @twitter and its 200+ corporate accounts, who adopted a more informal tone in late 2018 and use a Google doc with 300 drafts  —  The tweeters  —  When Twitter employee Ashley Tyra first heard from a colleague that the company was planning to shutter Fleets …
Joan E. Solsman / CNET:
Danny Nelson / CoinDesk:
DJ 3LAU launches Royal, which lets users trade shares of song royalty rights as crypto tokens, with $16M in seed funding led by Founders Fund and Paradigm  —  Paradigm and Founders Fund each invested $7 million, the crypto-savvy DJ told CoinDesk, with Paradigm's Fred Ehrsam joining the board.
Sujeong Lim / Counterpoint Research:
Apple Watch active user base crossed 100M globally in Q2, as the smartwatch market grew 27% YoY and the sub-$100 segment grew 547% YoY  —  - The market grew a healthy 27% YoY, thanks to strong demand for sub-$100 smartwatches.  — Samsung and Garmin posted remarkable YoY growth even as Apple maintained its lead.
Ian Carlos Campbell / The Verge:
Adam Mosseri says Instagram plans to more prominently feature photos and videos in search results in the future along with traditional accounts and hashtags  —  How search works and what it will be able to do next  —  Instagram plans to more prominently feature photos and videos in search results …
Matthew Gault / VICE:
Reddit CEO responds after calls from users to purge the site of COVID-19 disinformation, saying “dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy”  —  The CEO of Reddit has responded to calls from users to purge the site of disinformation, saying “dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy.”
New York Times:
A look at China's evolving approach to state-sponsored hacking, which borrows from Russia and Iran and increasingly relies on private sector hackers  —  The state security ministry is recruiting from a vast pool of private-sector hackers who often have their own agendas and sometimes use …
Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
Microsoft has promoted Chief Product Officer Panos Panay to executive vice president role and has added him to its senior leadership team  —  Microsoft Corp. promoted Chief Product Officer Panos Panay to the role of executive vice president and added him to the senior leadership team …
Reuters:
DOJ and SEC charged ex-HeadSpin CEO Manish Lachwani with allegedly defrauding investors out of $80M from 2018 to 2020 in an effort to boost HeadSpin's valuation  —  U.S. authorities on Wednesday charged a co-founder and former chief executive of HeadSpin with defrauding investors …
Insider:
In an abrupt reversal, OnlyFans suspends its October 1 policy change banning porn after securing “assurances” and aims to provide “a home for all creators”  —  - OnlyFans is reversing its recent decision to ban porn.  — It had planned to prohibit sexually explicit …

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