- August 4th, 2020
- 03:27 AM
- YouTube says the number of creators who no longer rely on ads for the majority of their earnings grew 40% between January and May (Bloomberg)
- 03:01 AM
- Zoom will halt direct sales to consumers in mainland China, only offering its tech via third-party partners starting Aug. 23 amid scrutiny over privacy concerns (Paayal Zaveri/Business Insider)
- 02:09 AM
- China to launch a state-run authentication system in Sept. for game makers to enforce game playing with real names; Tencent and NetEase use their own systems (Masha Borak/South China Morning Post)
- 01:43 AM
- Canalys: global Q2 tablet shipments grew 26% YoY to 37.5M, desktop PC shipments fell 26%; iPad shipments grew 19.8% YoY to 14.24M for a leading 38% market share (Jeremy Horwitz/VentureBeat)
- 12:51 AM
- Twitter says FTC may soon fine it $250M for using users' email addresses and phone numbers for ad targeting, practice was disclosed in October 2019 (Jacob Kastrenakes/The Verge)
- 12:51 AM
- Take-Two Interactive beat expectations in fiscal Q1 with revenue of $831.3M, up 54% YoY, despite not launching any new games during the quarter (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)
- August 3rd, 2020
- 11:59 PM
- Another video making Nancy Pelosi seem drunk goes viral; YouTube, Twitter removed versions of it, while Facebook, where it has 2M+ views, adds fact-check label (Donie O'Sullivan/CNN)
- 10:41 PM
- A look at the correspondence between a hacked US travel management firm, CWT, and the ransomware attackers, who were paid $4.5M in BTC to decrypt files (Jack Stubbs/@jc_stubbs)
- 09:49 PM
- Trump says he is fine with the idea of Microsoft buying TikTok in US, but the US government should be paid a "substantial amount of money" as part of the deal (Alex Wilhelm/TechCrunch)
- 08:57 PM
- Sources: AGs from NY and CA are partnering with the FTC to investigate Amazon's online marketplace, with plans to interview witnesses in coming weeks (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg)
- 08:57 PM
- The FCC will take public comment for 45 days on the Trump administration's petition for new transparency rules on how social media companies moderate content (David Shepardson/Reuters)
- 08:31 PM
- Trump says he is fine with the idea of Microsoft buying TikTok in US, but the US government should be paid a "substantial amount of money" as part of the deal (Bloomberg)
- 08:05 PM
- Google announces partnerships with six more banks to offer digital checking and savings accounts to Google Pay users in the US, starting next year (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- 08:05 PM
- Filings: the DOJ is scrutinizing the takeover of Credit Karma by Intuit, maker of TurboTax, amid concerns that the move would snuff out free tax prep options (ProPublica)
- 07:13 PM
- Farmers Business Network raises $250M in financing led by BlackRock, sources say valuing it at $1.75B, for its agronomic data sharing service (Katie Roof/Bloomberg)
- 06:47 PM
- Sources: after suffering a cyberattack that led to service outages, Garmin paid a "multi-million dollar" ransom to hackers using an intermediary called Arete IR (Alexander Martin/Sky News)
- 06:47 PM
- Snapchat says it's working on a feature that will let users set their Snaps to music, similar to TikTok's app, coming to English-language markets this fall (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- 05:55 PM
- Pixel 4A review: for $349, it sports 128GB storage, decent battery life, 5.8" 1080p screen, and a flagship-tier camera, great at photos but mediocre for video (Dieter Bohn/The Verge)
- 05:55 PM
- Google announces the $349 Pixel 4A, available for pre-order on August 20, $499 Pixel 4A 5G, and Pixel 5, coming later in fall (Dieter Bohn/The Verge)
- 05:03 PM
- Democrats offer predictions for Biden's tech policies: nothing too aggressive initially, but the relationship is likely to be less cozy than with Obama (Kyle Daly/Axios)
- 05:03 PM
- Microsoft has confirmed discussions to buy TikTok's operations in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but hasn't commented on its European presence (Sam Shead/CNBC)
- 04:37 PM
- The Content Authenticity Initiative, which includes Adobe, Twitter, and the NYT, releases a white paper detailing an open standard for media authentication (Kyle Daly/Axios)
- 04:11 PM
- How ByteDance tried to cross the US-China internet divide with TikTok, offering appeasements to both sides that were undermined by the geopolitical reality (Raymond Zhong/New York Times)
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- 04:11 PM
- Microsoft acquiring TikTok lets it access younger users growing up with iOS and Android, expand AR and Xbox offerings, and collect data (Tom Warren/The Verge)
- 03:45 PM
- Cellular coverage has recently transformed the Inuit community in Canada's remote Nunatsiavut, enabling them to connect and share their culture via social media (Cassandra Brooklyn/Ars Technica)
- 02:53 PM
- Sources: President Trump gave Microsoft only 45 days to negotiate its acquisition of TikTok (Reuters)
- 02:53 PM
- Sources: Grab is raising $200M from South Korean private equity firm Stic Investments Inc. (Bloomberg)
- 02:27 PM
- Apple reportedly removed 26K+ games from its Chinese app store on Saturday, about a month after a deadline for devs to have a government-issued game license (Reuters)
- 02:01 PM
- Apple faces a $1.4B lawsuit from Shanghai Zhizhen Network Technology, a Chinese AI firm that was recently awarded a patent for a voice assistant similar to Siri (Liza Lin/Wall Street Journal)
- 01:35 PM
- Google says it will invest $450M in smart home security company ADT, which will sell and install Nest smart home products (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)
- 12:43 PM
- A deep dive into Microsoft's work on climate change, how big a deal it is among tech companies, what influence it may have, and where it falls short (David Roberts/Vox)
- 08:23 AM
- A look at the rise of Jio, which is also a bet on tech nationalism and really one more chapter in Reliance's long history of coopetition with India's government (Byrne Hobart/The Diff)
- 04:55 AM
- Sources: behind TikTok's progress toward making a Microsoft deal, with weeks of talks that included US officials, nearly derailed by Trump's public opposition (Wall Street Journal)
- 04:03 AM
- Google debuts a Chrome extension to show how many ads are loaded on a web page, what advertisers are involved, and what user data was used for personalized ads (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
- 02:45 AM
- Profile of Twitter hack mastermind Graham Clark, a troubled teen who allegedly went from scamming on Minecraft to joining hacker forum OGUsers and SIM swapping (New York Times)
- 02:19 AM
- After a talk between Satya Nadella and Trump, Microsoft says it will continue discussions to explore a purchase of TikTok in US, which will wrap up by Sept. 15 (The Official Microsoft Blog)
- 01:27 AM
- Former Intel executive on how Intel achieved dominance in the computer industry after pivoting from memory chips to CPUs and then lost it as smartphones emerged (Michael Bruck/LinkedIn)
- 01:27 AM
- Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is mulling new rules around statements regarding election results including premature claims of victory (Ben Smith/New York Times)
- 12:09 AM
- Social video app Triller sues TikTok and Bytedance, claims they infringe on patent covering a way "for creating music videos synchronized with an audio track" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- August 2nd, 2020
- 10:51 PM
- Mike Pompeo suggests US will take action in the coming days against more Chinese software companies that it perceives as a risk to national security (Aime Williams/Financial Times)
- 09:59 PM
- Escalating threats to ban TikTok are pushing creators and users to apps like Triller, which has now topped the US App Store multiple times, Byte, Reels, others (Josh Constine/Constine's Moving ...)
- 07:23 PM
- TechHub, a co-working space that was once the heart of London's start-up scene, filed for administration (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)
- 06:05 PM
- Sources: Apple told some landlords of UK stores it wants rent reduction of up to 50% and a rent-free period, offering to extend leases by a few years in return (Sam Chambers/The Sunday Times)
- 02:11 PM
- Researchers describe how attackers can sidestep security features of chip-based credit and debit cards from certain banks to create counterfeit cards (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)
- 11:35 AM
- A look back at the rise of the custom ringtone industry, which had sales of $1.1B at its peak in 2007 before sales shrunk by 97% in the following decade (Gil Kazimirov/OneZero )
- 08:33 AM
- AI-generated "textfakes", masked as regular chatter on Twitter and Facebook, can be potentially far more subtle and sinister than deepfake videos or audiofakes (Renee DiResta/Wired)
- 08:07 AM
- Several pro sports teams, including Mets and the LAFC, are testing facial-recognition to make entry into stadiums as touchless as possible during the pandemic (Parmy Olson/Wall Street Journal)
- 07:15 AM
- IBM report: in 2020, the average data breach costs companies $3.86M to remedy, up 1.5% YoY; "mega" breaches involving 50M+ consumer records can cost up to $392M (Charlie Osborne/ZDNet)
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- 07:15 AM
- Ad analytics platform Pathmatics: Facebook's top 100 advertisers spent $221.4M from July 1 through July 29, down 12% YoY from the $251.4M they spent in 2019 (New York Times)
- 06:23 AM
- Officials say the Trump admin is withholding $20M approved by Congress for the Open Technology Fund, forcing the fund to halt 49 of 60 internet freedom projects (Spencer Hsu/Washington Post)
- 05:57 AM
- Facebook complies with an order by the Brazil's Supreme Court to block the accounts of a dozen top allies of President Bolsonaro, says it will appeal the order (BBC)
- 04:39 AM
- Berlin-based Everphone, which sells a "mobile as a service" device rental package to businesses, raises ~$40M Series B led by Signals Venture Capital (Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch)
- 01:37 AM
- Profile of Netflix's Bela Bajaria, who is leading the company's content growth outside of the US as its VP of local language originals (Elaine Low/Variety)
- August 1st, 2020
- 11:02 PM
- Sources: Microsoft, which was in advanced talks to buy the US operations of TikTok, has paused negotiations after Trump said on Friday that he opposes the deal (Wall Street Journal)
- 09:44 PM
- Vertex, which provides tax software for companies in more than 19,000 jurisdictions globally, raised $401M in its Nasdaq IPO on Tuesday at a valuation of $3B (Luisa Beltran/Barron's Online)
- 07:34 PM
- Q&A: Niantic COO Megan Quinn on its plans to open up tech that powers Pokémon Go to other developers, working with Qualcomm on AR reference hardware, and more (Janko Roettgers/Protocol)
- 06:42 PM
- Acquiring TikTok would be a big bet for Microsoft in the consumer social media space that could bring content moderation and other regulatory risks (Aaron Tilley/Wall Street Journal)
- 05:50 PM
- Court documents show how FBI used a leaked copy of the OGUsers forum database, user details from Discord, and data from Coinbase to track down Twitter hackers (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
- 04:32 PM
- Sources: ByteDance has agreed to divest US operations of TikTok under a proposed new deal with the White House that would see Microsoft take over TikTok in US (Echo Wang/Reuters)
- 02:48 PM
- Data from the US Census Bureau on 583,000 businesses in 2018 shows AI adoption is slow: 8.9% use AI in any form, 2.8% use ML, and 2.5% use voice recognition (Will Knight/Wired)
- 12:38 PM
- Profile of ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming, his early decision to make TikTok an international platform, and how TikTok's fate rests on US-China relations (Michael Schuman/The Atlantic)
- 10:28 AM
- Tencent offered to buy out and take private NYSE-listed Chinese search giant Sogou for $2.1B; Tencent owns about 39% of Sogou and has majority voting power (Bloomberg)
- 08:18 AM
- Companies are increasingly using employee survey data, from services like Perceptyx that offer a "union vulnerability index", to predict and squash organizing (Sarah Kessler/OneZero )
- 07:52 AM
- A look at Election Cyber Surge, which aims to bolster US election cybersecurity by matching local election officials with cybersecurity experts who want to help (Kevin Collier/NBC News)
- 07:00 AM
- Google updates its "Why this ad" feature, now "About this ad", to show verified names of advertisers and is testing "trust tokens" to replace 3rd-party cookies (Mike Schulman/The Keyword)
- 06:08 AM
- William English, who alongside Douglas Engelbart built the first computer with a mouse and showed it at "The Mother of All Demos", dies at 91 (Cade Metz/New York Times)
- 05:42 AM
- President Trump says he will ban TikTok in the US through executive action as soon as Saturday (CNBC)
- 05:16 AM
- When companies have too many smaller teams, slicing problems too thinly, they face high coordination costs as teams become too dependent on each other (Kislay Verma)
- 04:50 AM
- Lemonaid Health, which offers an on-demand service for accessing health care online, raises $33M Series B, bringing its total raised to $55M (Christine Hall/Crunchbase News)
- 03:34 AM
- Sources: Apple has acquired Mobeewave, a startup with tech that could transform iPhones into payment terminals; one source says deal is worth ~$100M (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
- 03:08 AM
- COVID-19 has pushed museums to improve their online offerings, including virtual tours, as they explore potential business models based on digital content (Daniel Grant/Wall Street Journal)
- 01:50 AM
- YouTube plans to discontinue its community captions feature on September 28 due to lack of use and spam abuse; critics contend it will stifle accessibility (Kim Lyons/The Verge)
- 12:58 AM
- Sources: ByteDance execs see acquisition by Microsoft as more viable because of management's ability to absorb company as well as ByteDance execs' prior ties (The Information)
- 12:58 AM
- Microsoft to end support for all third-party Cortana skills on September 7 and drop support for the dedicated Cortana apps on iOS and Android in early 2021 (Mary Jo Foley/ZDNet)
- 12:32 AM
- North Face and Heineken are among the companies that say they will resume Facebook ads in August, while SAP, Smucker Co., others say they will continue boycott (Wall Street Journal)