Techmeme
January 23, 2021, 7:10 AM

Top News

Sam Byford / The Verge:
Microsoft backtracks on price hike for Xbox Live Gold subscriptions announced Friday and says free-to-play games will also no longer require a Gold subscription  —  Free-to-play games will also no longer require a Gold subscription  —  Microsoft has reversed its controversial Xbox Live price increase.
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Microsoft president Brad Smith defended the company's political contributions in a meeting with employees after some questioned donations from its PAC  —  - Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said the company needs the Microsoft Political Action Committee.  — The company is looking …
Charlie Savage / New York Times:
Unclassified memo: Defense Intelligence Agency analysts have used commercial databases of location data from smartphone apps to track Americans without warrants  —  The disclosure comes amid growing legislative scrutiny of how the government uses commercially available location records.
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Ex-ADT technician pled guilty to computer fraud and invasive visual recording for viewing home security camera feeds he installed in ~200 homes over 9,000 times  —  Employee for ADT accessed ~200 customer cams on more than 9,600 occasions.  —  A home security technician has admitted …
USA Today:
Facebook says a configuration change has caused some users to be logged out of their apps and is working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible  —  “Why am I logged out of Facebook?”  The question ricocheted around the internet as an untold number of people across …
William Boston / Wall Street Journal:
Todd Spangler / Variety:
MoffettNathanson survey: 62% of Apple TV+ subscribers were on free offers in Q4 2020, only 30% said they plan to renew at the regular $4.99/month price  —  Apple has said it wants to bulk up revenue from services — including Apple TV Plus, which is just over one year old.
Dara Kerr / CNET:
Eric Newcomer / Newcomer:
Sources: data analytics service Databricks is in talks to raise a private funding round, potentially valuing it at ~$27B; Databricks was valued at $6.2B in 2019  —  The Andreessen Horowitz and NEA-backed company is raising a private round.  —  Databricks — a data and AI platform …
Will Knight / Wired:
A look at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, a government-sponsored research lab, and its work on a new language model similar to GPT-3  —  China produces as many artificial intelligence researchers as the US, but it lags in key fields like machine learning.  The government hopes to make up ground.
Nick Clegg / About Facebook:
Facebook is referring its decision to indefinitely suspend Trump's accounts to the Oversight Board and says the accounts will remain suspended in the meantime  —  Today, Facebook is referring its decision to indefinitely suspend former US President Donald Trump's access to his Facebook …

Sponsor Posts

Meta:
Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few  —  Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.
Tribe AI:
Build AI products that matter  —  Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact.  We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.
Zoho:
5 common accounting mistakes  —  This is a guest post by Yaali Bizappln Solutions.  A lot of businesses manage their customers and finances on separate platforms.  This disconnect often leads to missed invoices …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Ride Home:
(BNS) Brian's Appearance On Daily Detroit
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:10 AM ET, January 23, 2021.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Brendan Sinclair / GamesIndustry.biz:
Matt Day / Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Josh Taylor / The Guardian:
Steven Levy / Wired:
Alex Kantrowitz / OneZero :
April Glaser / NBC News: