Techmeme
December 16, 2020, 10:20 AM

Top News

Washington Post:
SolarWinds' top investors Silver Lake and Thoma Bravo sold a combined $286M worth of stock in the company on Dec. 7, six days before the hack was made public  —  The timing of the trades raises questions about whether major shareholders used inside information to avoid stark losses after the attack.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Sources: Microsoft and industry partners seize key command and control domain used in SolarWinds hack  —  By seizing the domain, Microsoft and its partners hope to identify all victims, but are also preventing attackers from escalating intrusions in currently infected networks.
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Facebook attacks Apple in full-page newspaper ads, claiming upcoming iOS 14 changes that limit data gathering and targeted ads are bad for small businesses  —  - Ads criticize Apple's plan to restrict some data gathering  — Facebook placed ads in the NYT, WSJ and Washington Post
Joe Rossignol / MacRumors:
Mozilla releases Firefox 84 with native support for Apple M1 Macs, saying the browser launches over 2.5 times faster and web apps are now twice as responsive  —  Mozilla today released Firefox version 84 with native support for Apple Silicon Macs with the M1 chip, touting …
Ryan Mac / BuzzFeed News:
Facebook is working on an AI tool called TLDR, which would summarize articles in bullet points and which was announced in an end-of-year, company-wide meeting  —  Facebook told employees on Tuesday that it's developing a tool to summarize news articles so users won't have to read them.
Periscope:
Twitter says it will discontinue Periscope as a separate mobile app by March 2021, after bringing most of the core capabilities of Periscope into Twitter  —  Today, we're sharing that we have made the difficult decision to discontinue Periscope as a separate mobile app by March 2021.
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Australian regulator sues Facebook for allegedly using its Onavo VPN app to spy on users for commercial purposes in 2016 and 2017  —  Yet more trouble brewing for Facebook: Australia's Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is suing the tech giant over its use, in 2016 and 2017 …
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Facebook is building a video product called Super that will let people pay content creators or celebrities to interact with them during a live broadcast  —  - New product ‘Super’ is still being tested at social network  — Facebook is developing more video features during the pandemic
Joseph Menn / Reuters:
Facebook will shift its UK users into user agreements with its HQ in California, instead of its Irish unit, moving them out of reach of EU's privacy laws  —  SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc will shift all its users in the United Kingdom into user agreements with the corporate headquarters …
CoinDesk:
Bitcoin crosses $20K to reach an all-time high after doubling in the past three months  —  After testing investor patience for three weeks, bitcoin has finally crossed above $20,000 to reach fresh all-time highs.  —  The number one cryptocurrency by market value jumped …
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Neverware, which helps schools and enterprises resurrect old PCs with its Chromium-based CloudReady OS, gets acquired by Google, which invested in its Series B  —  Neverware lets you turn old PCs and Macs into Chromebook-esque devices through its CloudReady OS.
The Verge:
Google has restored service after a significant number of Gmail users saw “error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior” for a few hours  —  Stadia was experiencing issues, too  —  Google says that a “significant subset” of Gmail users ran into errors with the service Tuesday afternoon.
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Facebook and Twitter represent v1 of social networking, a bad copy of the analog world, whereas v2 is something unique to digital and a lot more promising  —  Manage your Stratechery subscription.  —  It's a rather motley crew.  One is a nurse, another a lawyer, a third an investment adviser.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Bolt, the Estonia-based on-demand transport network covering 200 cities in 40 countries, raises €150M led by D1 Capital Partners  —  In the midst of a major second wave of coronavirus infections across Europe, an Estonian startup that's building an on-demand network to move food …
Hirsh Chitkara / Protocol:
Interview with Stanford comp lit professor Adrian Daub on the naiveté of undergrads eager to work in tech, “useless” VC Twitter, and challenges to SV narratives  —  In the early 2010s, professor Adrian Daub began noticing changes in some Stanford undergraduates that troubled him.

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