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Michelle Gao / CNBC:
From working remotely to benefiting from the new normal, tech companies led the way in pandemic response, but fell behind in stopping COVID-19 misinformation — - Tech companies were the first to cancel events and send workers home because of Covid concerns in early 2020.
Reuters:
Mastercard SpendingPulse: US online holiday sales from Oct. 11 to Dec. 24 grew 49% YoY, for a 19.7% share of overall retail sales, up from about 13.4% in 2019 — (Reuters) -U.S. retail sales rose 3% during this year's expanded holiday shopping season from Oct. 11 to Dec. 24 …
Steven Overly / Politico:
Facebook critics say a general animosity toward Facebook in Washington may push the Biden administration into taking more proactive measures against the company — Joe Biden has said he's no fan of Facebook. Now he has an opportunity to show it as he assumes landmark policy and legal battles against the company.
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple's system status webpage indicates that the company has resolved an outage affecting iCloud Account and Sign In services — Apple's system status webpage indicates that the company has resolved an outage affecting “iCloud Account and Sign In” services.
Andrew Davis / Bloomberg:
Report: Facebook closed Irish subsidiary and moved billions in profits back to US following IRS suit; Irish subsidiary paid $101M in tax on $15B profit in 2018 — Facebook Inc. has moved to wind down several Irish holding companies that had allowed it to shift billions of dollars in profit to the country …
Will Knight / Wired:
David Silver, a principal research scientist at DeepMind, on AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and MuZero, applying reinforcement learning to real world problems, and more — David Silver of DeepMind, who helped create the program that defeated a Go champion, thinks rewards are central to how machines—and humans—acquire knowledge.
MacRumors:
Apple's system status page is showing issues with “iCloud Account and Sign In” since Christmas morning, as users complain about problems with device activation — Apple's status page shows an ongoing issue with “iCloud Account and Sign In” since early Christmas morning.
Paresh Dave / Reuters:
Laptop and desktop manufacturers are still months away from fulfilling outstanding orders as sales see a renaissance; shortages won't ease until 2022 — OAKLAND, Calif. (Reuters) - The world stocked up on laptop and desktop computers in 2020 at a level not seen since the iPhone debuted in 2007 …
Paresh Dave / Reuters:
Laptop and desktop manufacturers are still months away from fulfilling outstanding orders as sales see a renaissance; shortages won't ease until 2022 — OAKLAND, Calif. (Reuters) - The world stocked up on laptop and desktop computers in 2020 at a level not seen since the iPhone debuted in 2007 …
Sarah Fallon / Wired:
Profile of Ray Holt, who in the 1960s jointly developed the F-14 Tomcat's Central Air Data Computer, considered by some to be the first microprocessor — In a weird way, I've known Ray Holt all my life, but I never knew what he had accomplished—or how his inventions wove their way into my own family.
Ionut Ilascu / BleepingComputer:
Microsoft's patch for a zero-day privilege escalation Windows bug in June did not fix the vulnerability, which could still be exploited with some adjustments — Back in June, Microsoft released a fix for a vulnerability in the Windows operating system that enabled attackers to increase …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
2020 political campaigns secured emails with physical security keys from a nonprofit working with Google and Microsoft; source says Biden's campaign used keys — - Keys from the likes of Google and Yubico became a hit among campaign workers this year, including in Joe Biden's campaign.
Julia Alexander / The Verge:
2020 has been the beginning of major streaming exclusivity plays, forcing users to pay for four or five services as big studios prioritize their own platforms — End-of-year turnover is always rough, and it's going to get worse — Two of the biggest movies people want to talk about this week …
Ankit Malhotra / Counterpoint Research:
With 31% market share, MediaTek becomes the biggest smartphone SoC vendor globally in Q3, surpassing Qualcomm, which remains the largest 5G chipset vendor — - More than 100 million smartphones were sold globally with MediaTek chipsets in Q3 2020. — Qualcomm led the market for 5G chipsets in Q3 2020.
“Are you okay?”
I don’t have a good answer to the question. Knowing full well that I’m talking back to an algorithm — even one asking the same question of everyone with a different band mad-libbed in — doesn’t soften the blow. Am I? Are we? Is anyone, really?
In this case, it’s referring to Waxahatchee. I mean, yeah, I totally listened to a lot of Waxahatchee this year. Waxahatchee is good. Saint Cloud was one of my favorite albums of the year. Katie Crutchfield’s music doesn’t exist in the Elliott Smith, Leonard Cohen bin for me. It’s not time to send up the signal flares when you see the band all over my Spotify social feed.
The Spotify roasting AI that’s been making the rounds this week is a fun exercise in music snobbery. It also may be brushing against some larger truth here. Something I think we all considered at least in passing this year when Spotify offered its annual “Wrapped” year in review.
What’s the soundtrack to the worst year, ever? What do we listen to while the world burns? In 2009, a former CNN intern stumbled across a video tape in the archives labeled with the title, “Turner Doomsday Video.” The minute-long video features a band playing, “Nearer My God To Thee,” believed to be the final song played by the band on the Titanic. It carried the explicit instructions, “HFR [Hold for Release] till end of the world confirmed.”
Barring any sort of last-minute surprise, it seems likely we’ll make it through 2020 shy of a full-on apocalypse (in spite of, perhaps, the best efforts of some). But for me, Spotify’s year in review was a testament to hell year, just as my Apple Watch exercise bars saw a zeroing out in late-March and April, as the pandemic bore down on my home of Queens, New York and I dealt with some personal health issues.
What was pitched as a celebratory aggregation of my listening habits over the previous 12 months exited the machine as a testament to the long stretches of time where engaging with music felt like an impossibility. Ambient music and post-rock got me listening again when lyrics seemed like too much to process. And I’m sure I’m not alone in having listened to some comfort tracks with an alarming frequency.
Looking back is a useful reminder of the role music played in what undoubtedly qualifies as the worst year to date for many. It would be an overstatement to suggest that music saved my life in 2020, but it certainly cushioned the blow of one too many emotional gut punches.
“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear,” the late-neurologist, Oliver Sacks wrote. “But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more – it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”
Louis Armstrong put it even more succinctly: “music is life itself.”
It’s a cruel irony that, in a year when music has meant so much to so many, most musicians have struggled to make ends meet. The musical field certainly isn’t unique in that respect this year, but their struggles have been pronounced in an era when streaming revenues offer fractions of cents what musicians make in record sales, and touring has become the most important revenue stream for all but the biggest names. For the past 10 months, that all but dried up.
“The pandemic utterly decimated the live-music industry,” Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy noted in a recent interview. “There’s been almost an entire year now of absolutely zero revenue.”
In May, a survey from the Musician’s Union noted that 19% of musicians said they might end up giving up their careers due to the impact of COVID-19. Seven months later, one wonders whether that figure might have been optimistic.
Tweedy adds, “There will be places to play. But the landscape won’t ever look the same. I imagine that a lot of the more intimate music venues will be gone, just like a lot of small businesses and restaurants.”
Bandcamp has been a beacon for many. The service’s “Bandcamp Fridays,” which waive its revenue cut, have raised $40 million to date. The site has promised to continue offering the feature at least through May of next year.
This year’s struggles have served to highlight concerns over streaming royalties. Spotify has understandably been the focal point for this conversation, all while the company has spent hundreds of millions to bolster its podcast programming. CEO Daniel Ek didn’t do himself any favors in July when he noted, “Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.”
In October, Justice at Spotify rep (and Galaxie 500 member) Damon Kurkowski told me “[R]esponse from certain corners of the industry has been as cold as we expected: ‘You’re just musicians and don’t understand business,’ is the basic gist of it. To which I would say: The problem we are calling attention to is precisely that musicians have been left out of the conversation! We always come last in payment and in consultation — even though our work is what the streaming business is built on.”
The struggle to survive on music is nothing new, of course. Jazz genius Thelonious Monk famously had a benefactor in Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. But just because we’ve failed musicians in the past doesn’t mean we can’t and shouldn’t do better.
Am I okay? I’m still not sure, but listening to music seems to help.
Sara Morrison / Vox:
Privacy laws in the US had momentum at the beginning of 2020, but the pandemic has focused Congress elsewhere and forced everyone to give up more data online — Our lives moved online in 2020. Too bad privacy laws didn't. — SHARE All sharing options — As a digital privacy reporter …
