Techmeme
June 16, 2022, 1:50 AM

Top News

New York Times:
Internal Kraken comms and interviews with five workers: some staff accuse CEO Jesse Powell of fostering a hateful workplace and dozens are considering quitting  —  Jesse Powell, who leads the crypto exchange Kraken, has challenged the use of preferred pronouns, debated who can use racial slurs and called American women “brainwashed.”
Molly White / @molly0xfff:
[Thread] A look at Kraken's announcement of a culture overhaul, eschewing “stereotypical team diversity measurements”, as the crypto exchange touts hiring plans  —  Kraken, a U.S.-based crypto exchange, has announced they'll be continuing to hire, and have announced a culture overhaul that promotes “diversity of thought” over “stereotypical team diversity measurements” and prohibits describing another's words as “racist” or “x-phobic”. 🧵
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Internal memo: Meta plans to make Facebook more like TikTok, including bringing Messenger back into the app and recommending posts from “unconnected” sources  —  Facebook employees were recently given a new directive with sweeping implications: make the app's feed more like TikTok.
The Markup:
Investigation: 294+ US crisis pregnancy centers, which try to dissuade people from abortions, share website visitor info with Meta via Facebook's tracking pixel  —  The social media giant gathers data from crisis pregnancy centers through a tracking tool that works whether or not a person is logged in to their Facebook account
Josh Taylor / The Guardian:
CNN:
Japan passes an amendment making “online insults” punishable by up to a year in prison, after the suicide of a reality TV star who had faced social media abuse  —  Tokyo (CNN)Japan's parliament on Monday passed legislation making “online insults” punishable by imprisonment amid …
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
DataStax, which develops a cloud-native noSQL database built on Apache Cassandra, raised $115M at a $1.6B valuation; DataStax had an $830M valuation in 2014  —  When DataStax hired Chet Kapoor as CEO in October 2019, one of the first moves he made was to bring in his old pal Sam Ramji …
New York Times:
NHTSA data from July 1, 2021, to May 15, 2022: six people died in 392 incidents involving driver-assistance tech; Teslas were in 273 crashes and five were fatal  —  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released data on 10 months of crashes involving systems like Tesla's Autopilot.
Reuters:
Sources: the US increased its funding into VPN companies nthLink, Psiphon, and Lantern by about 50% since February to support the surge in their Russian users  —  The U.S. government has pushed new, increased funding into three technology companies since the start of the Ukraine conflict …
Javeria Khalid / Rest of World:
After Pakistan banned dating apps Tinder, Grindr, and Skout in September 2020, Facebook matchmaking groups for Pakistanis gained tens of thousands of members  —  A ban on dating apps like Tinder has left young Pakistanis with limited avenues to meet new people.  Facebook matchmaking groups are gaining popularity among them.
Vildana Hajric / Bloomberg:
Cardano, Solana, and Dogecoin gained 4.5% to 11% after the Federal Reserve's interest rate hike; bitcoin rose as much as 6.1% and ether gained as much as 6.6%  —  Wednesday brought at least one positive development in the beaten-down crypto space: Alternative digital currencies posted big rallies …
Anna Kramer / Protocol:
The NLRB files a complaint against Mapbox, whose leadership allegedly threatened jobs for union organizing and fired organizers after a failed August 2021 vote  —  Mapbox has just been slapped with a complaint from the National Labor Relations Board that alleges the company's leadership threatened job loss …
Jon Porter / The Verge:
Carl Pei reveals Nothing phone (1) ahead of its July 12 launch event, saying “leaks are harder to contain nowadays”; details likely to come over the next month  —  Nothing, the consumer tech startup led by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, has shown off the rear design of its debut Phone 1 smartphone.

Sponsor Posts

Google:
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UiPath:
UiPath Unveils 10 Innovations that Will Shape the Agentic Future  —  Orchestration engine, API workflows and agentic testing among key features of new UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation, launched at UiPath DevCon 2025
Zoho:
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IDrive:
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More News

Sydney Maki / Bloomberg:
Mariella Moon / Engadget:
Miles Kruppa / Wall Street Journal:

Earlier Picks

Financial Times:
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
Frank Chaparro / The Block: