Day: July 16, 2020

Politicians on both sides of the aisle had scathing words and warnings for Twitter after a hacker was able to infiltrate the service and send scammy requests for bitcoin from a number of high-profile accounts, including those of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama. Notably, the account belonging to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was also implicated. This made one thing clear: The breach — and its consequences — could have been much worse. Lawmakers now say Twitter must do better to stop something like this from ever happening again.

Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, expressed …

Three months ago, Netflix announced that it had seen a huge surge in new subscribers because people were stuck at home around the world, waiting out the Covid-19 pandemic.

So consider this a repeat: Netflix says that it also did great during April, May, and June of this year — because people were stuck at home around the world, waiting out the Covid-19 pandemic.

More specifically: The company signed up another 10 million more subscribers and now has 193 million subscribers worldwide.

The downside, Netflix said, is also something the company said last quarter: It worries that just about …

In the earlier days of the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the country’s public health departments, still reliant on fax machines, were woefully unprepared for the massive amounts of data they needed to process. Looking for a tidy private sector solution to a messy government problem, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) paid a shadowy Silicon Valley company with ties to the Trump administration to build something new. That company is called Palantir Technologies, and if you don’t know much about it, that’s by design.

Palantir specializes in data-gathering and analysis, most of which it does for …

Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Tom Carper, Brian Schatz, and Sheldon Whitehouse are demanding more information from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about a reported “loophole” for climate misinformation in Facebook’s fact-checking program.

In a letter sent to Zuckerberg on Wednesday, the senators reference a widely reported-on incident from last year that involved a story about climate change models written by two people from an organization called the CO2 Coalition and published by the Washington Examiner. The piece questioned the extent of climate change and was flagged as false by one of Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners, Science Feedback. Five scientists contributed to the …

Silicon Valley’s elite are choosing their partisan teams with just over 100 days to go until Election Day — and few appear to be backing President Donald Trump.

The clearest view yet of the breakdown came in fundraising reports released Wednesday. They portray a tech industry that has unmistakably coalesced around Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, despite him being the first choice of few during the party primary. Now, juxtaposed against a president long reviled by the power set of Silicon Valley, Biden is sweeping up cash from billionaires, CEOs, and political kingmakers in a show of force.

A …