Lucas Matney / TechCrunch : Researchers working on Twitter's bluesky effort discuss how its open decentralized standard for social media could hinder efforts to stop online radicalization — The platform's vision of a sweeping open standard could also be the far-right's internet endgame
Julie Jargon / Wall Street Journal : Discord says over the past six months it took steps to make the service safer for kids, including more proactive policing and limiting what minors can access — Chat platform popular with gamers tries to shed anything-goes image; safety expert says, ‘I would give them a B+’
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet : DuckDuckGo surpassed 100M daily search queries for the first time on Jan. 11; since August 2020, the search engine began seeing over 2B search queries per month — DuckDuckGo reaches historic milestone in a week when both Signal and Telegram saw a huge influx of new users.
Washington Post : Dating apps like Tinder and Bumble are banning users identified in photos from the Capitol riot, and some users are relaying incriminating evidence to the FBI — Bumble, Tinder and others are freezing out rioters with help from law enforcement — and, in some cases, their own photos.
Issie Lapowsky / Protocol : The attack on the Capitol sparked a tense debate among online extremism researchers about crowdsourced efforts to identify the rioters and “ethical doxxing” — The uprising has sparked a tense debate about the right way to stitch together the digital scraps of someone's life to publicly accuse them of committing a crime.
In one of his final public appearances before leaving the White House next week, Vice President Mike Pence urged the Biden administration to exercise "eternal vigilance," especially when it comes to U.S.-China relations.
At least half of the eight GOP senators who voted against President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory will be attending the inauguration Wednesday in Washington to support the peaceful transfer of power, Fox News has learned.
Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times : Deliveroo says it has raised $180M in new funding from existing investors led by Durable Capital Partners and Fidelity Management at a $7B+ valuation — Private financing boost for food delivery app ahead of long-awaited stock market debut — Deliveroo's valuation shot up to more than $7bn …
Chloe Lo / Bloomberg : Yidu Tech, which offers AI software to the health care industry, saw its shares jump 148% in its Hong Kong debut on Friday after raising ~$531M in its IPO — - Health-care tech firm raised $531 million in Hong Kong IPO — Yidu Tech's IPO was very heavily oversubscribed by investors
President-elect Biden is planning to sign several executive orders on day one of his presidency, incoming chief of staff Ron Klain announced in a statement.
"Real Time" host Bill Maher on Friday night addressed the death of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran from California who was fatally shot inside the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Emily Birnbaum / Protocol : Biden's COVID-19 relief bill earmarks $9B to beef up the CISA and $200M to hire technology and cyber experts to support the federal CISO and US Digital Service — He will announce the plan on Thursday night. — President-elect Joe Biden is hoping to push a massive COVID-19 relief bill through Congress …
South China Morning Post : A look at the rise and fall of Xiami, Alibaba's Chinese music streaming service, which only had 22.4M MAUs by Oct. 2020 vs. 450M+ for Tencent's three music apps — Once a leader, Xiami saw its monthly active users (MAUs) fall to 22.4 million by October 2020, a tiny fraction of the 450 million …
The U.S. State Department on Friday night said it had "reason to believe" scientists in Wuhan, China, may have been infected with the coronavirus in the autumn of 2019
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., assigned partial blame to Facebook for last week's riots and indicated Friday that Congress' response should focus on holding Big Tech accountable rather than ramping up domestic surveillance.
Calum Marsh / New York Times : Profile of New Zealand-based Letterboxd, a social network for reviewing movies, which has grown to 3M member accounts during the pandemic — The social media network has finally left the cinephile niche and entered the mainstream. — Early last decade, Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow …
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch : A security researcher was able to purchase one of the Democratic Republic of Congo's top-level domains, potentially preventing malicious use by attackers — Fredrik Almroth thought the authorities would try to save the critical domain name. Nobody ever did.
Richard Barnett, the Arkansas man photographed sitting with his feet on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, was put under house arrest.
Wall Street Journal : FAA approves the first fully automated commercial drone flights, letting Massachusetts-based American Robotics operate its drones in rural areas below 400 feet — American Robotics granted permission to operate drones without hands-on piloting — U.S. aviation regulators have approved …
Incoming White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki declined Friday to specify whether President-elect Joe Biden’s administration would publish White House’s visitor logs
President-elect Biden on Friday unveiled what he touted as a “bold” plan to meet his promised goal of 100 million coronavirus vaccinations by the end of his first 100 days.
Former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang launched his bid for Mayor of New York City this week, but his campaign is off to a rough start after social media slammed the tech entrepreneur for posting a video in a bodega that many New Yorkers said was too open and spacious to actually be a bodega.
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman raised eyebrows on Friday by claiming that "lies" about the 2020 presidential election are not constitutionally protected.
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat : Israel-based social casino game developer Playtika closes up 17.1% on its first day of trading, valuing the company at $14.5B, after raising $1.88B in its IPO — Playtika went public today in an initial public offering at $27 a share, giving the mobile game publisher a valuation of $11.4 billion.
Tom Warren / The Verge : Microsoft is planning to fix a Windows 10 vulnerability that could corrupt a NTFS-formatted hard drive simply by viewing a folder with a malicious shortcut — A bizarre Windows bug for 2021 — Microsoft says it's planning to fix a bizarre Windows 10 bug that could corrupt a hard drive just by looking at an icon.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat : Oqton, which is developing a factory OS that combines several fabrication processes like CNC and polymer 3D printing, raises $40M Series A — Oqton, a startup developing a factory operating system that integrates engineering software with manufacturing hardware, today raised $40 million.