Techmeme
November 17, 2020, 8:55 AM

Top News

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Twitter rolls out Fleets, its ephemeral Stories feature, globally, and says it plans to test an audio-based social networking feature similar to Clubhouse  —  Twitter this morning is launching its own version of Stories — aka “Fleets” — to its global user base.
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 …
CNBC:
Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy, letting customers in the US order prescription medications for home delivery, including free delivery for Prime members  —  - Amazon is making its biggest move yet into the pharmacy space.  — Amazon Pharmacy is designed to make it easy and convenient to order prescription medicines online.
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.
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 …
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 …
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.
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
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 …
Clio Chang / Columbia Journalism Review:
Profile of Substack, whose founders insist it is a platform, not a media company, and say there is less need for moderation as readers opt in to newsletters  —  Did a newsletter company create a more equitable media system—or replicate the flaws of the old one?
CNBC:
Walmart says its US e-commerce sales grew 79% YoY in Q3  —  - Walmart's U.S. e-commerce sales soared by 79% in the third quarter, as customers continued to shop online during the coronavirus pandemic.  — Instead of browsing store aisles, more customers are shipping purchases to their homes …
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 …
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 …
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.

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Todd Spangler / Variety:
Financial Times:
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