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Techmeme
February 23, 2022, 12:10 PM

Top News

Drew Harwell / Washington Post:
Trump's Truth Social has been almost entirely inaccessible in its first few days due to technical glitches, a 13-hour outage, and a 300,000-person waitlist  —  Former president Donald Trump, a longtime critic of how Democrats debuted Healthcare.gov, is facing a bungled website launch of his own.
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Truth Social, like Parler and Gettr, looks to be structured for mostly one-way communication, broadcast primarily to an audience of Trumpist dead-enders  —  Conservative alternative social networks keep making the same mistakes  —  I.  —  Today, let's talk about some of the less obvious ways …
Stuart A. Thompson / New York Times:
As Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and other right-wing commentators sour on Google, some push DuckDuckGo as an alternative, arguing Google suppresses COVID-19 results  —  The embrace by some conservative influencers and conspiracy theorists is part of a broader effort to shift people away from Big Tech.
Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
Microsoft expands its Defender for Cloud tool to Google Cloud, three months after adding AWS support  —  Microsoft Corp. is expanding its product for finding and monitoring security weak spots in cloud-computing to include rival Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud Platform.
Jillian Deutsch / Bloomberg:
The EU unveils the Data Act, setting rules on how companies and individuals can access anonymized data; AWS and Azure would be forced to make switching easier  —  The European Union unveiled new rules that will make it easier for users to transfer data generated from products like Amazon.com Inc.'s Alexa or a Tesla Inc. vehicle.
Kellen Browning / New York Times:
Despite letting some employees permanently work from home, tech companies are spending billions of dollars expanding their office spaces across the US  —  Even as they allow some employees to change how often they come into the office, tech companies are rapidly buying and leasing properties around the country.
Emily Nicolle / Bloomberg:
DappRadar: OpenSea's seven-day trading volume is down 37%, as active traders dropped 19% to 227,272, after a hacker used a phishing attack to steal 254 NFTs  —  Activity on OpenSea, the world's largest marketplace for digital collectibles, likely dropped precipitously after a phishing attack …
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
With Meta handicapped by Apple's ATT privacy changes, Shopify should step up to provide substitute functionality and build its own advertising network  —  Tobi Lütke, who famously started Shopify when he realized that the software he built to run his snowboard shop was a much bigger opportunity …
Stephen Totilo / Axios:
SEC filing: Activision CEO Kotick gets $15M if Microsoft fires him without cause; Phil Spencer began acquisition talks three days after WSJ's damaging exposé  —  There are big potential payouts ahead for controversial Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, according to an extensive SEC filing …
Dan Taylor / Tech.eu:
Milan-based BNPL startup Scalapay raises a $497M Series B led by Tencent and Willoughby, bringing its total funding to $1.2B, becoming Italy's first unicorn  —  It's been a long time coming, but Italy now has its first unicorn in Scalapay as the buy-now-pay-later company raises $497 million in a Series B round.
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Amazon sues AppSally and Rebatest, alleging the sites had their combined 900K+ users post fake Amazon reviews to boost third-party sellers' product rankings  —  - Amazon on Tuesday filed lawsuits against two companies that allegedly acted as fake review brokers.
Peter Wayner / VentureBeat:
Redpanda, a data streaming service formerly known as Vectorized, raises a $50M Series B led by GV  —  Today, Redpanda Data, the data streaming platform formerly known as Vectorized, announced a successful $50 million series B round.  The company's main product offers a simpler mechanism …

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