Techmeme
December 4, 2020, 5:35 PM

Top News

Nicholas Kristof / New York Times:
How Montreal-based Pornhub profits from child and revenge porn, rape, spy cam and other criminal, non-consensual sex videos  —  Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?  —  Pornhub prides itself on being the cheery, winking face of naughty …
New York Times:
EU law inhibiting the monitoring of email, messaging, and other services that takes effect Dec. 20 would also restrict scanning for child sexual abuse imagery  —  Regulators argue that while abuse imagery on the internet is abhorrent, unchecked scanning for it by tech companies could violate privacy rights.
Forbes:
Friends and colleagues of Tony Hsieh say he was privately coping with issues of mental health and addiction, made worse by COVID lockdowns, over the past year  —  When the business icon died in a fire last week, questions abounded.  The answers seem rooted in a Covid-period spiral, where he turned to drugs and shunned old friends.
Reuters:
In an internal email, Google's head of AI says that Gebru threatened to resign unless she was told which colleagues deemed her draft paper as unpublishable  —  OAKLAND, Calif. (Reuters) - A top Google scientist on ethical artificial intelligence says she was fired after criticizing …
Jessica Toonkel / The Information:
Sources: WarnerMedia is weighing 2 new streaming services, with a subscription service based on CNN content in 2021 and a free entertainment service for 2022  —  AT&T's WarnerMedia, long a giant in cable TV, was a late arrival to streaming video.  Under its new CEO, Jason Kilar, Warner is trying to make up for lost time.
Julia Alexander / The Verge:
Tom Simonite / Wired:
Chinese scientists claim quantum supremacy with a system that calculates in mins what would take a supercomputer 2B years, using tech different than Google's  —  Google trumpeted its quantum computer that outperformed a conventional supercomputer.  A Chinese group says it's done the same, with different technology.
Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
Apple's Screen Recognition, a computer vision system in iOS14 trained on images of apps in use, labels the UI elements on screen for users who are blind  —  Apple has always gone out of its way to build features for users with disabilities, and VoiceOver on iOS is an invaluable tool for anyone …
Brian Barrett / Wired:
IBM researchers say a sophisticated global phishing campaign is targeting the companies involved in the “cold chain” needed to distribute COVID-19 vaccines  —  As vaccines await US approval, a sophisticated global phishing campaign has tried to harvest credentials from companies involved in their distribution.

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Earlier Picks

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