Techmeme
January 14, 2022, 12:00 AM

Top News

NBC News:
The January 6 House committee subpoenas Meta, Alphabet, Reddit, and Twitter after their “inadequate responses” to requests for information about the riot  —  The House committee investigating Jan. 6 on Thursday subpoenaed Reddit, Twitter and the parent companies of Google and Facebook after their …
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
Fortnite returns to iOS and Android through a closed beta in Nvidia's GeForce Now game streaming service designed to run in mobile browsers  —  Nvidia's GeForce Now is finally bringing Fortnite back to the iPhone  —  Fortnite is back on iOS today... sort of.
Kent Walker / The Keyword:
Following the White House's open-source security summit, Google proposes setting up an organization to serve as a marketplace for open source maintenance  —  We welcomed the opportunity to participate in the White House Open Source Software Security Summit today, building on our work …
Washington Post:
A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduces the TLDR Act, which would require sites and apps to offer easy-to-digest, nutrition label-like summaries of their TOS  —  Happy Thursday!  Below: The FCC proposes new data breach rules for telecom and the White House meets with tech leaders on cyber.
Aoyon Ashraf / CoinDesk:
Block says it is building an open-source bitcoin mining system to make mining more “distributed and efficient”, after Jack Dorsey teased the idea in October  —  The payment services company formerly known as Square is open to building new mining computers and is hiring for a new engineering team.
Meghan Bobrowsky / Wall Street Journal:
Second Life founder Philip Rosedale returns to Linden Research, in which his startup High Fidelity made an investment, to take on the metaverse  —  Philip Rosedale is coming back to the digital world he created to help inject growth  —  The founder of Second Life, one of the earliest digital-reality worlds …
Aislinn Keely / The Block:
Near Foundation, which develops the proof-of-stake Near blockchain, raises $150M led by Three-Arrows Capital, with a16z and others participating  —  The NEAR Foundation has closed a $150 million funding round less as it looks to become the hub of an open web3.
Allison Johnson / The Verge:
A look at Android 12's rollout, one of the buggiest launches in the past few years, as Samsung and OnePlus pause their stable Android 12-based updates  —  Android 12 is one of the platform's most ambitious updates in recent history, bringing a major design overhaul to every corner of the operating system.
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Austria's data protection watchdog upholds a decision that a website using Google Analytics violates GDPR, a potential issue for US cloud services in Europe  —  A decision by Austria's data protection watchdog upholding a complaint against a website related to its use of Google Analytics does …
Nitasha Tiku / Washington Post:
As newcomers flood to Puerto Rico seeking to build a crypto paradise, attracted by low taxes, locals are skeptical and house prices across San Juan are rising  —  SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Gustavo Diaz Skoff met the crypto utopians in 2018 amid the devastation of Hurricane Maria.
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Microsoft hires a law firm to review its sexual harassment policies and issue a report in the spring about the investigations, including one involving Gates  —  - A review that a law firm will conduct for Microsoft's board on the effectiveness of sexual harassment policies will compare …
Nathaniel Mott / PCMag:
Amazon patches two AWS flaws discovered by Orca Security that could have exposed information managed by Glue users and leaked sensitive files via CloudFormation  —  The flaw could be used by AWS Glue users to access other users' data.  A second bug with AWS CloudFormation, also fixed, could have been used to leak sensitive files.
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Canalys: worldwide PC shipments grew 15% YoY in 2021 to 341M, the highest annual number since 2012; Apple shipped 28.3% more units, Acer 21.8%, and Dell 18%  —  It would be easy to think PC sales dropped worldwide last year amid chip shortages, but that conventional thinking would be wrong.
TechCrunch:
Q&A with Wordle creator Josh Wardle on the game's origin story, reasons for keeping it simple, app clones, and handling the traffic from its newfound popularity  —  “People have an appetite for things that transparently don't want anything from you.”  —  The internet loves …
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Virtana, which provides AI-driven monitoring software to help manage multiple cloud environments, raises $73M from Atalaya Capital Management and others  —  Hybrid cloud, which refers to a mix of computing, storage, and services across on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud infrastructure …
Martine Paris / Bloomberg:
Apple confirms it removed several Wordle clones from the App Store, after some app developers capitalized on the online guessing game's popularity  —  Apple Inc. removed several Wordle games from its App Store after users confused them with another word-play title popularized by Jimmy Fallon and other celebrities.
Coco Feng / South China Morning Post:
China's state-backed Blockchain Services Network plans to roll out infrastructure this month to support NFTs; the NFTs will not be linked to cryptocurrencies  —  The BSN-Distributed Digital Certificate does not support crypto-transacted NFTs, and will allow businesses and individuals …
Bloomberg:
Twitter's “work from anywhere” policy helped increase the share of US Black and Latinx employees to 9.4% and 8% in 2021, from 6.9% and 5.5% in 2020  —  Twitter Inc.'s early shift to a “work from anywhere” model during the pandemic as well as implementation of a requirement to add …

Sponsor Posts

Airtable:
Meet Airtable ProductCentral  —  The unified solution for managing your entire product development process in the AI era.
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:
Zoho SalesIQ turns 10: Transforming customer experiences since 2014  —  October marked a remarkable milestone for Zoho SalesIQ—our 10th anniversary.  What began in 2014 as a simple live chat tool has evolved …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Fri. 11/01 - ChatGPT Search
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 12:00 AM ET, January 14, 2022.

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

Rachel Pannett / Washington Post:

Earlier Picks

Andrew Deck / Rest of World:
Blake Brittain / Reuters:
Reuters: