🏷 Amazon Has Been Slashing Private-Label Selection Amid Weak Sales

Plus: The book ban movement has a chilling new tactic. U.S. App Store revenue from non-game apps just topped games for the first time. And more…

Today’s pick

Amazon Has Been Slashing Private-Label Selection Amid Weak Sales. Amazon.com Inc. has started drastically reducing the number of items it sells under its own brands, and the company has discussed the possibility of exiting the private-label business entirely to alleviate regulatory pressure, according to people… (Dana Mattioli / Wall Street Journal)

Dana Mattioli @DanaMattioli

Amazon is drastically slashing the size of its private label business, and internally has considered exiting the business in full

wsj.comWSJ News Exclusive | Amazon Has Been Slashing Private-Label Selection Amid Weak SalesExecutives also have discussed exiting the business entirely to address regulatory pressure.

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The book ban movement has a chilling new tactic: harassing teachers on social media. “This type of rhetoric is going to get people killed,” she says. Corpus Christi, where Vera lives, has become a flashpoint for a growing push among Christian and conservative groups across the US to get certain books and topics they… (Tanya Basu / MIT Technology Review)

Tanya Basu @tanyabasu

Book bans are getting ugly and violent as conservative groups target educators online and harass them on their social media accounts. My story here:

technologyreview.comThe book ban movement has a chilling new tactic: harassing teachers on social mediaEducators who stand up to conservative activists are being harassed and called “groomers” online, turning them into potential targets for real-world violence.

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U.S. App Store revenue from non-game apps just topped games for the first time. A major shift in the U.S. app economy has just taken place. In the second quarter of this year, U.S. consumer spending in non-game mobile apps surpassed spending in mobile games for the first time in May 2022 and the trend continued in June. This… (Sarah Perez / TechCrunch)

Sarah Perez @sarahintampa

U.S. App Store revenue from non-game apps just topped games for the first time:

ift.ttUS App Store revenue from non-game apps just topped games for the first time – TechCrunchA major shift in the U.S. app economy has just taken place. In the second quarter of this year, U.S. consumer spending in non-game mobile apps surpassed spending in mobile games for the first time in May 2022 and the trend continued in June. This drove the total revenue generated by non-game apps h…

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The hidden history of screen readers. On a night in 1978, Ted Henter was driving a rental car down a dark road in the English countryside. A 27-year-old motorcycle racer from Florida, Henter had just won eighth place in the Venezuelan Grand Prix, the first race of the 1978 World… (Sheon Han / The Verge)

Sheon Han @sheonhan

For @verge, I wrote about screen readers—which are to visually impaired users what monitors are to sighted users—and blind programmers who have been creating this software for decades.

theverge.comThe hidden history of screen readersProgrammers who are blind pioneered accessibility software.

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A New Attack Can Unmask Anonymous Users on Any Major Browser. Everyone from advertisers and marketers to government-backed hackers and spyware makers wants to identify and track users across the web. And while a staggering amount of infrastructure is already in place to do exactly that, the appetite for data… (Lily Hay Newman / WIRED)

WIRED @WIRED

How this de-anonymization attack works is difficult to explain but relatively easy to grasp once you have the gist.

wired.trib.alA New Attack Can Unmask Anonymous Users on Any Major BrowserResearchers have found a way to use the web’s basic functions to identify who visits a site—without the user detecting the hack.

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