Techmeme
November 19, 2021, 6:05 PM

Top News

Kelly Crow / Wall Street Journal:
ConstitutionDAO, which crowdfunded over $40M, loses Sotheby's US Constitution auction to a $43.2M bid from Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin  —  The 53-year-old billionaire paid $43.2 million for the historic document; he plans to lend it to a museum in Arkansas  —  Chicago hedge-fund billionaire …
Matt Burgess / Wired UK:
DuckDuckGo launches App Tracking Protection for Android, a beta feature that blocks third-party trackers from Google and Facebook  —  The privacy-focused tech company's latest update promises to block invasive data collection across your whole phone.  —  At the end of April …
Reuters:
Internal documents describe how Amazon's lobbying helped it kill or undermine privacy protections in more than three dozen bills across 25 US states  —  The governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, speaking in 2018 after Amazon picked the state as the site of its new headquarters.
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Defense Department solicits bids from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle for cloud contracts; DoD canceled its $10B JEDI contract in July  —  - The U.S. Defense Department expects to dole out cloud contracts to multiple companies.  — The new push comes after Pentagon scrapped its plans …
Catie Keck / The Verge:
A look at Open Connect, Netflix's in-house CDN that launched a decade ago and spans 17,000 servers across 158 countries  —  As hundreds of thousands of households worldwide tapped into Netflix's Squid Game last month, viewers may have taken something fairly extraordinary for granted.
Matthew Gault / VICE:
An artist and programmer in Australia creates The NFT Bay, a torrent website where anyone can download 15TB of NFT JPEGs  —  An artist and programer in Australia has uploaded 15 Terabytes of NFTs to a server.  Here's the torrent for them.  —  Matthew Gault
Steven Levy / Wired:
Alphabet X's Everyday Robots says it now has a fleet of 100+ robot prototypes that are autonomously performing tasks like wiping tables around its offices  —  Plus: The man behind a famous paradox, the laws that will govern the metaverse, and a deadly swarm of scorpions.  —  Hi, everyone!
Shannon Bond / NPR:
Meta says it's looking at how users from marginalized communities experience its products and releases a paper on changes to how it uses US demographic data  —  The parent company of Facebook and Instagram is looking into whether its platforms treat users differently based on race …
Ryan Broderick / Garbage Day:
Thinkarete Lifestyle, cited by Facebook as Q3's most widely viewed Page in the US, seems to be a barely active drop-shipping scheme with stolen content  —  Read to the end for a fascinating thread about why music sucks now  —  Unmasking The Most Viral Page On Facebook
Michelle F Davis / Bloomberg:
Benchling, which makes cloud-based software to manage biotech R&D, raises a $100M Series F at a $6.1B valuation; Benchling was last valued at $4B in April  —  - New investor Franklin Templeton leads round with Altimeter  — Companies using firm's software include Regeneron, Eli Lilly
Susan Decker / Bloomberg:
ITC says it will review its preliminary finding that Google infringed on five patents owned by Sonos; a final decision is scheduled to be issued on January 6  —  - ITC will review findings on Sonos's patents, Google's designs  — Sonos is seeking an import ban on Google smart home devices
Dustin Volz / Wall Street Journal:
DOJ says Iranian hackers breached a media company in fall 2020 and tested how to create false news content; sources say Lee Enterprises was targeted  —  Computer systems of Lee Enterprises, which owns dozens of daily papers, were targeted in disinformation campaign
The Information:
Sources: Facebook is offering musicians and celebrities, via production companies, payments to host Live Audio Rooms; source says up to $50K per session  —  Facebook is offering to pay musicians and other celebrities tens of thousands of dollars to host sessions on its new live audio feature …

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:
Passkeys Week for a passwordless future: Learn how Zoho is embracing passkeys  —  Passkeys are the modern-day alternative authentication method that was introduced to replace traditional passwords for enhanced security and convenience.
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:
Mon. 11/18 - More Smartglasses On The Horizon
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 6:05 PM ET, November 19, 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

Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
Dallas Morning News:

Earlier Picks

Henry Powderly / Search Engine Land:
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
Wall Street Journal:
Mark Di Stefano / The Information:
Bryan Walsh / Axios:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: