Techmeme
November 17, 2020, 2:35 AM

Top News

Joseph Menn / Reuters:
Twitter names Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, veteran of Stripe, Google, and DARPA, to the new position of head of security  —  SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Social media giant Twitter TWTR.N Inc, under increased threat of regulation and plagued by serious security breaches …
Abby Vollmer / The GitHub Blog:
GitHub reinstates the youtube-dl project, raises its bar for DMCA takedown requests, and creates $1M legal defense fund to help open source devs fight takedowns  —  Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project …
BuzzFeed News:
Internal Facebook data shows that labels on Trump's election misinformation posts only decreased shares by ~8%, and failed to slow their spread across the site  —  Internal data shows that labels on President Trump's posts decrease reshares by about 8%.  They still account for some of the most engaging posts on the platform.
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Airbnb releases public IPO filing, seeks Nasdaq listing under ticker ABNB, reports $219M in net income on revenues of $1.3B last quarter, down nearly 19% YoY  —  - Airbnb has released its prospectus to debut on public markets.  —  Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb
Jeffrey Goldberg / The Atlantic:
Barack Obama says today's online information ecosystem, which boosts conspiracy theories like QAnon, is “the single biggest threat to our democracy”  —  Barack Obama was describing to me the manner in which the Mongol emperor and war-crimes innovator Genghis Khan would besiege a town.
Joseph Cox / VICE:
Investigation: US military buys granular movement data of people around the world from a wide array of apps for Muslim dating, prayer, Craigslist, weather, more  —  A Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain …
David Kirton / Reuters:
Huawei is selling its Honor smartphone unit to a consortium of over 30 agents and dealers for an undisclosed sum; buyers are creating a new company for purchase  —  Huawei Technologies Co Ltd is selling its budget brand smartphone unit Honor to a consortium of over 30 agents and dealers …
Financial Times:
Max Schrems' campaign group noyb files complaints with German and Spanish regulators, claiming Apple breaks EU law by letting advertisers track users via IDFA  —  Austrian activist files complaints with German and Spanish data protection authorities  —  Apple is breaking EU law …
Callum Booth / The Next Web:
Security researcher demonstrates how Apple's apps on macOS Big Sur bypass firewalls and VPNs, an issue first brought to light in October  —  DON'T WORRY THOUGH, APPLE REALLY, REALLY, REALLY CARES ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY  —  For all of Apple's talk of being privacy-first, often its marketing speak …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Apple Podcasts now lets anyone create an embeddable web player for shows or individual episodes  —  Apple is making it easier to discover and listen to podcasts via the web.  The company announced today an Apple Podcasts embed web player is now available, allowing anyone — including creators …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Zoom unveils At-Risk Meeting Notifier, a feature that scans the net for posted Zoom meeting links and alerts meeting organizers to potential Zoombombing attacks  —  The new “At-Risk Meeting Notifier” Zoom feature scans the internet and alerts conference organizers when a link to their Zoom meeting has been posted online.
BuzzFeed News:
Sources: Facebook's 3rd-party content mods were never instructed to enforce its “call to arms policy” from 2019, meant to prevent real-world armed intimidation  —  “What we learned after Kenosha is that Facebook's call to arms policy didn't just fail.  It was never designed to function properly in the first place."
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Chooch.ai, which seeks to help companies adopt computer vision more broadly, raises $20M Series A led by Vickers Venture Partners  —  Chooch.ai, a startup that hopes to bring computer vision more broadly to companies to help them identify and tag elements at high speed, announced a $20 million Series A today.
Rita Liao / TechCrunch:
China-based Zilliz, which builds open source software for processing unstructured data, raises $43M Series B led by Hillhouse Capital  —  For years, founders and investors in China had little interest in open-source software because it did not seem like the most viable business model.
Todd Spangler / Variety:
WarnerMedia says HBO Max will be available on Amazon Fire devices from November 17  —  The HBO Max app for Amazon's devices will be available Tuesday, Nov. 17.  The launch will bring WarnerMedia's flagship direct-to-consumer product to Amazon's estimated 40 million-plus active Fire TV users …
Jean-Louis Gassée / Monday Note:
It's hard to believe Craig Federighi's claim that Apple wasn't “remotely considering” touch for Macs, given Big Sur's large controls and iOS apps coming to Macs  —  Reviews of new Apple Silicon Macs are not out yet.  They're likely to be good.  But one small disappointment lingers …
Hartley Charlton / MacRumors:

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