D&T Issue 72

Hi there!
Hope you’re having a splendid week thus far.

Amazon seems to be in a tough spot knowing that their lawyers potentially bribing government officials in India for a variety of reasons. Besides Amazon investigating the problem, so are the folks at the CCI and the ED.

We’ve got some good reads for you so let’s jump right in.

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A look at the history of mediums used for writing to explore techniques that were used before the web existed and how they influenced us today.

The Contrarian, a study of Thiel’s rise to power by tech reporter Max Chafkin, takes as its central question: What, precisely, does Thiel believe? This piece by The Baffler writes an opinion on who Mr Thiel is, what his motivations have been, and what he’d rather want you to believe.

The electric carmaker has several of the pieces in place to take on Uber and Lyft someday. But it’s started whipping up excitement far too early.

The mission, called Inspiration4, includes four private citizens who will fly on a Crew Dragon spacecraft for an Earth-orbiting mission.

In total, more than 813,000 apps with over 9 billion downloads — 86%+ of which targeted children aged 12 and under — were removed from the Google Play and Apple App Stores. After analyzing more than five million mobile apps, the report found that consumer privacy and security, as well as brand safety for advertisers, may be at risk.

After the various numbers of exposes of the company carried out by many outfits, particularly by the WSJ, Facebook has something to say in response.

Chinese tech giant ByteDance is developing a music streaming platform for the Chinese market and plans to launch the app later this year, Chinese media 36Kr reported (in Chinese) Thursday, citing sources with knowledge of the matter.

It’s getting harder for people to believe that Facebook is a net good for society.

Finance firms have long struggled to reach young and new customers — until now.

Presenting Rest of World’s starter kit for fitting in Bengaluru.

Sci-Hub is a website that hosts over 87 million research papers and makes them available for free to students and academics. In December 2020, three academic publishing giants filed a lawsuit against Sci-Hub in India, the country with the second-largest number of Sci-Hub users in the world.