10 things in tech you need to know today

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday. Sign up here to get this email in your inbox every morning.

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1. Trump pardoned an ex-Google engineer facing prison. Anthony Levandowski was included in Trump’s list of last-minute pardons, having been sentenced to 18 months in jail for stealing trade secrets around self-driving cars.
2. Jack Ma is back. The Alibaba billionaire resurfaced in a live stream on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported, ending speculation as to his fate.
3. QAnon followers are giving up. Wednesday was the final chance at redemption for QAnon, a baseless far-right conspiracy theory alleging that former President Donald Trump was fighting a “deep state” cabal of pedophiles and human traffickers.
4. Parler was rejected by multiple hosting providers. The alternative social messaging app asked at least six large providers to host it after Amazon Web Services (AWS) took it offline. 
5. Police are finding Musk’s flamethrowers in drug busts. The Not-A-Flamethrower has turned up in at least three police weapon seizures since July last year, TechCrunch reported.
6. Bitcoin sank. It fell as low as $33,412.72 on Wednesday as investors continued to take profits from the cryptocurrency’s massive rally.
7. OAN scrubbed news articles about Dominion from its site. One America News Network has quietly scrubbed its website of references to election conspiracy theories, which could be an attempt to fend off a lawsuit from the election-technology companies it had targeted in its stories.
8. Exclusive: Oracle has a new cloud and AI org. Executive VP Don Johnson, once thought to be a co-CEO contender, will run the new department, called Oracle Cloud Platform & AI Services.
9. Exclusive: Amazon employees are fighting the firm’s surveillance of workers. Over 200 employees signed a petition calling for transparency around Amazon’s labor-tracking efforts.
10. Exclusive: Plaid is on a hiring spree. The company has observed a 25% increase in applications and a 50% increase in employee referrals since a multibillion-dollar acquisition deal with Visa was pronounced dead.