Techmeme
December 22, 2021, 2:00 PM

Top News

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Amid COVID-19 concerns, Meta, Amazon, Pinterest, and Twitter cancel in-person CES plans, T-Mobile and AMD plan a limited presence, and others monitor conditions  —  - Google, HTC, Samsung and Sony still currently plan to go  — Host of CES conference remains steadfast in moving forward
Washington Post:
Survey of 1,058 US internet users: 72% distrust Facebook, 63% TikTok, 60% Instagram, 53% WhatsApp, and 53% YouTube; 53% trust Amazon, 48% Google, and 44% Apple  —  You'll find all the usual technology suspects inside Mary Veselka's Pearland, Tex., home.  There's her iPhone …
Ben Dummett / Wall Street Journal:
Skillsoft, which makes training software for businesses, acquires edtech startup Codecademy for $525M in cash and stock; Codecademy raised $40M in February  —  Acquisition is Skillsoft's largest deal since going public in June  —  Skillsoft Corp. has agreed to acquire rival U.S.-based …
More: ZDNet and Skillsoft
Tweets: @skillsoft, @denehyxxl, and @zsims
Mehul Srivastava / Financial Times:
Sources detail how a 2019 NSO deal to sell Pegasus services to Uganda, followed by an attempt to hack US diplomats in Uganda using Pegasus, led to NSO's decline  —  For years, the Israeli spyware maker thrived through scandal.  Then, US diplomats in Uganda got hacked by Pegasus
Reuters:
Chinese state media says regulators suspended an info-sharing partnership with Alibaba Cloud over accusations it failed to promptly report and fix a Log4j flaw  —  Chinese regulators on Wednesday suspended an information-sharing partnership with Alibaba Cloud Computing …
Lucas Matney / TechCrunch:
An announcement bot for Justin Kan's NFT platform Fractal was hacked by a scammer who made off with about $150K, before the startup even launched its platform  —  Despite billions in VC investment, many web3 crypto platforms are still pretty hostile places for users new to the crypto world.
Vlad Savov / Bloomberg:
Jack Dorsey's tweet sparks uproar: “You don't own ‘web3.’ The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It's ultimately a centralized entity”  —  Fresh off relinquishing the chief executive reins of Twitter Inc., Bitcoin enthusiast Jack Dorsey …
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Q&A with Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell on meeting pandemic demand, relationships with Apple and Amazon, killing the Harmony remote line, USB-C, and more  —  Logitech is one of those ubiquitous companies — it's been around since 1981, selling all kinds of important things that connect …
Alex Konrad / Forbes:
Retool, a low-code tool for creating enterprise apps, raises a $20M Series C from Stripe founders and others at a $1.85B pre-money valuation  —  Covering venture capital, software and startups  —  When Retool CEO David Hsu set out recently to raise fresh funding for his low-code software startup …
Tom Krisher / Associated Press:
US NHTSA opens an investigation into Tesla's “Passenger Play” in-car gaming feature covering 580,000 vehicles from 2017 to 2022  —  ATHENS, Ohio (AP) — The U.S. has opened a formal investigation into Tesla allowing drivers to play video games on a center touch screen while its vehicles are moving.
Chris Vallance / BBC:
The UK's ad regulator bans two ads by Arsenal FC promoting its Socios-based Fan Tokens, saying the soccer club “failed to illustrate the risk of the investment”  —  A web page and a Facebook post by Arsenal football club promoting crypto-based fan tokens broke advertising rules, a watchdog has ruled.
David Pierce / Protocol:
Interview with Automattic's Matt Mullenweg on working from his always-connected RV, making “the Berkshire Hathaway of the internet”, and betting on open systems  —  In the early days of the pandemic, Matt Mullenweg didn't move to a compound in Hawaii, bug out to a bunker …
Bloomberg:
Intel faces criticism in China after asking suppliers not to use Xinjiang labor or products, with a Weibo hashtag on the topic drawing over 250M views  —  - Chipmaker says it doesn't use labor or supplies from Xinjiang  — Western nations have accused China of forced labor in region

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