Techmeme
January 20, 2021, 10:30 AM

Top News

Zoë Bernard / The Information:
Sources: Andreessen Horowitz to launch an opinion section on its website that will publish articles related to technology and business from outside contributors  —  Silicon Valley investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, which once courted attention from the news media, is ramping up its own media efforts.
Eric Newcomer / Newcomer:
A look at a16z's communication efforts over the years, as the firm expands its own media operations and has largely stopped cooperating with reporters  —  Why media whisperer Margit Wennmachers is going direct.  —  Benedict Evans, Andreessen Horowitz's former in-house analyst …
Richard Lawler / Engadget:
Donald Trump pardons ex-Waymo and Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski; Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey were among those supporting a pardon for Levandowski  —  Last year Anthony Levandowski pleaded guilty to one count of stealing materials from Google, where he was an engineer for its self-driving car efforts …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Malwarebytes says it was hacked by group that breached SolarWinds, via Azure and Office 365 exploits, but attackers only accessed a subset of internal emails  —  Malwarebytes becomes fourth major security firm targeted by attackers after Microsoft, FireEye, and CrowdStrike.
Bloomberg:
Jack Ma has resurfaced after months out of public view, addressing teachers on an online conference, quashing intense speculation about his fate  —  Alibaba and Ant co-founder Jack Ma has resurfaced after months out of public view, quashing intense speculation about the plight …
Lauren Feiner / CNBC:
Netflix reports Q4 revenue of $6.64B vs. $6.63B est., up 21.5% YoY, and global streaming paid memberships of 203.7M, up 8.5M vs. 6.5M est.; stock up 12%+  —  - Netflix reported fourth quarter 2020 earnings Tuesday that beat analyst expectations on revenue and net subscriber additions but fell below EPS estimates.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Netflix says its “Shuffle Play” feature, which lets Netflix's algorithm choose what you watch next, will roll out globally to all users in H1 2021  —  Netflix is always in search of a better way to instantly connect users to something to watch, instead of having them waste …
Alexandra Alper / Reuters:
Trump signs an executive order that seeks to thwart foreign use of cloud computing products or services for malicious cyber operations against the US  —  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Outgoing President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at thwarting foreign use of cloud computing products …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Brave becomes the first major browser to natively support IPFS protocol, useful for accessing censored content; Wikipedia and other sites offer IPFS versions  —  Brave users will now be able to seamlessly access ipfs:// links.  —  With the release of Brave 1.19 today …
Ina Fried / Axios:
Google is investigating why Margaret Mitchell, who helps lead its ethical AI team, downloaded and shared a large number of files with people outside the company  —  Google is investigating recent actions by Margaret Mitchell, who helps lead the company's ethical AI team, Axios has confirmed.
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Q&A with Instagram head Adam Mosseri on keeping users safe at scale, content moderation, Facebook's actions against Trump, future regulation, Reels, and more  —  Adam Mosseri has a broad view of Facebook, its capabilities, and its challenges.  And Facebook has a lot of challenges right now …
Rita Liao / TechCrunch:
Douyin, ByteDance's Chinese version of TikTok, has launched e-wallet “Douyin Pay” to compete with China's dominant e-payment services WeChat Pay and Alipay  —  Tencent's WeChat Pay and Alibaba's affiliate Alipay have long dominated digital payments in China, but they have always faced new challengers.
Kia Kokalitcheva / Axios:
Biden picks former CFTC chairman Gary Gensler, who taught courses on cryptocurrencies and blockchain at MIT, to head the SEC  —  Gary Gensler's nomination to head the U.S. Securities and Exchange is welcome news for the cryptocurrency industry given his ongoing and deep interest in the technology.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
FireEye releases a free tool that audits networks to determine whether certain techniques, known to be employed by SolarWinds hackers, were used  —  New Azure AD Investigator is now available via GitHub.  —  Cybersecurity firm FireEye has released today a report detailing the techniques used …

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