Techmeme
December 15, 2020, 12:25 AM

Top News

Reuters:
SolarWinds: under 18,000 customers were compromised between March and June via an update to its Orion software, leading to DHS, Treasury, Commerce Dept. hacks  —  LONDON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. IT company SolarWinds said on Monday that up to 18,000 of its customers had downloaded …
Reuters:
Sources: state-sponsored hackers accessed US DHS internal communications as part of the campaign that penetrated US Treasury and Commerce departments  —  A team of sophisticated hackers believed to be working for the Russian government won access to internal communications at the U.S. Department …
Dustin Volz / Wall Street Journal:
Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:
Nicole Nguyen / Wall Street Journal:
Review of Apple's Fitness+ subscription service: a relatively good deal compared to rivals, with plenty of workouts, but requiring a Watch might put people off  —  The $10-a-month app takes on at-home fitness for a competitive price but with an expensive catch
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Apple releases iOS 14.3 and macOS Big Sur 11.1 and launches its app privacy labels across all of its App Stores  —  At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June, the company announced it would soon require developers to disclose their app's privacy practices to customers via new …
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple releases iOS 14.3 with ProRAW for iPhone 12 Pro, Fitness+, support for AirPods Max and launching App Clips by scanning Apple's App Clip Codes, and more  —  Apple will release iOS 14.3 and iPadOS 14.3 to all users today.  The update includes new features such as Apple ProRAW for iPhone 12 Pro users …
Erin Griffith / New York Times:
Pinterest to pay $22.5M to settle a gender discrimination suit brought by ex-COO Françoise Brougher, who said she was fired after speaking up about mistreatment  —  The suit had been brought by Françoise Brougher, Pinterest's former chief operating officer, who said she was fired after speaking up about mistreatment.
Lauren Feiner / CNBC:
FTC orders Amazon, ByteDance, Discord, Facebook and WhatsApp, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, and YouTube to share info on how they collect and use their users' data  —  - The Federal Trade Commission is requiring nine tech companies to share information about how they collect and use data from their users, the agency announced Monday.
Samantha Cole / VICE:
Pornhub says it has removed all videos from unverified accounts from its platform; the number of hosted videos dropped from 13.5M to 7.2M  —  After changing its policies to ban unverified uploaders and Mastercard and Visa's decision to drop the platform entirely, Pornhub has removed millions of videos.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Google says Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, and other Google services suffered a worldwide outage for about an hour for a majority of users on Monday  —  Update: It looks like services are slowly starting to come back again.  We've contacted Google for a statement about what happened.
Edward Ludlow / Bloomberg:
Amazon's Zoox unveils an autonomous electric robotaxi that can hold four passengers and run for a claimed 16 hours on a single charge, with a launch date TBC  —  - Vehicle seats four and can run for 16 hours before recharging  — CEO says Zoox may eventually build package delivery vehicles
Sean O'Kane / The Verge:
California regulators fine Uber $59M for failing to give info on sexual assault cases, will cancel license if Uber fails to pay and provide info within 30 days  —  It has 30 days to pay — and answer — or risk suspension in California  —  Uber has 30 days to pay a $59 million fine …
Brandon Russell / XDA Developers:
Signal updates its iOS and Android apps with support for encrypted group video calls with up to five participants  —  Signal on Monday announced the launch of group calls which, like everything else on the platform, is end-to-end encrypted.  The new feature, which builds …
New York Times:
In H1 2020, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft spent ~$23M on EU lobbying, equal to what they declared for all of 2019 and up from ~$8.3M in 2014  —  Silicon Valley is building a powerful influence industry in Brussels, which has “never seen this kind of money” spent this way.
Politico:

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