10 things in tech you need to know today

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Monday. Sign up here to get this email in your inbox every morning. Have an Amazon Alexa device? Listen to this update by searching “Business Insider” in your flash briefing settings.

1. Twitter regrets blocking the Hunter Biden story. CEO Jack Dorsey said the “straight blocking of URLs was wrong”, after Republicans cried anti-conservative bias.
2. Bill Gates thinks Big Tech is better prepared for antitrust. Gates said he didn’t do enough to develop relationships in Washington DC.
3. Ex-Facebook exec Palmer Luckey reportedly held a fundraiser for Trump. Luckey is thought to have hosted the fundraiser at his and his wife’s home in Southern California on Sunday.
   
4. Silicon Valley is exhausted. A new survey from anonymous workplace chat app Blind found that 68% of tech workers feel more burned out than they did when they worked at an office. 
5. Larry Ellison donated $250,000 to a pro-Lindsey Graham super PAC. The Oracle founder made the donation the day TikTok’s tie-up with the cloud software firm was announced.
   
6. Microsoft helped identify ocean trash with machine learning. The Ocean Cleanup is a nonprofit that designs technology to clean up plastic from the ocean, and participated in a Microsoft hackathon.
7. MessageBird’s CEO says Europe is catching up to the US. Robert Vis, whose firm just hit a $3 billion valuation, told Business Insider that Europe has increasing capital and talent was no longer emigrating abroad.
8. Former TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer is investing in tech. Mayer was quietly revealed Tuesday as a participant in a $1.5 million seed-funding round for Moment House, a new platform designed for artists to host ticketed concerts and live events.
9. Influencer contracts now have clauses for coronavirus. Force majeure clauses are also being expanded to include app closures amid fears of a ban on TikTok, according to analysis by Business Insider.
10. Google can identify a song from your humming. A user can hum,whistle, or sing for 10-15 seconds, and then Google’s technology takes the song’s melody and turns it into a numbers-based sequence.