Techmeme River
Techmeme River
Monday, March 27, 2023
5:55 AM
Kaspersky: some versions of Pinduoduo, suspended by Google from its app store, exploited Android vulnerabilities to install backdoors and gain user data access
Bloomberg
4:55 AM
Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan says crypto does not “bring anything useful for society” and other processing power uses like AI are more worthwhile than crypto mining
The Guardian
4:35 AM
The French government bans TikTok and all other recreational apps from staff phones, claiming none have sufficiently robust security for government devices
The Register
4:05 AM
Alex Szapiro, co-head of SoftBank's nearly $8B Latin America fund, says he is confident about securing extra capital from its parent despite a ~$900M paper loss
Financial Times
1:50 AM
First Citizens agrees to buy the commercial banking business of Silicon Valley Bank from the FDIC including all deposits and loans
Bloomberg
Sunday, March 26, 2023
11:15 PM
A look at Modulate's ToxMod and other AI-based tools that help gaming companies moderate voice chats in online games, amid concerns of accuracy and user privacy
Wall Street Journal
11:05 PM
Sources: the Hong Kong arms of three Chinese state banks have reached out to offer services to crypto businesses in recent months, despite a mainland crypto ban
Bloomberg
10:40 PM
A mid-March Midjourney update seemingly fixed one of the AI image generator's major failings: its inability to depict lifelike human hands with five fingers
Washington Post
8:35 PM
After India's legal orders this week, Twitter blocked the tweets of 122 users, including reporters and politicians, from Indian users; it used to push back more
Rest of World
8:00 PM
A look at OBNBrandon, a prolific scammer in a booming community focused on banning influencers' accounts, mainly on Instagram, and extorting for “reactivation”
ProPublica
6:30 PM
Filing: some Twitter source code was leaked by user “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” on GitHub, which removed the code to comply with Twitter's DMCA notice on March 24
New York Times
2:00 PM
A profile of Atlanta-based Yellow Card, Africa's largest centralized crypto exchange, which raised $57M and facilitated $1.75B in transactions since 2019
CNBC
11:40 AM
Eight current and former Apple employees share their concerns about the upcoming MR headset's $3,000 price, its utility, and the unproven AR/VR market
New York Times
10:25 AM
Sources: Apple last week demoed its mixed reality headset, likely dubbed Reality Pro or Reality One, for its top ~100 executives, ahead of their annual offsite
Bloomberg
8:10 AM
A look at the Chinese social e-commerce app and women-friendly “lifestyle bible” Xiaohongshu, which has 200M MAUs and critics describe as a consumerist trap
Rest of World
5:05 AM
Experts say some US suppliers plan to sidestep export controls by selling tech to the unlisted subsidiaries of Inspur and other Chinese firms on the Entity List
Wall Street Journal
2:00 AM
A look at the community of users who “jailbreak” GPT models to generate unfiltered content and see themselves as fighting back against OpenAI's closed policies
VICE
1:35 AM
Sources: concerned about Chinese spying, the US helped SubCom win its $600M bid for a Singapore-France subsea cable project via incentives and investor pressure
Reuters
1:20 AM
Hollywood and music industry insiders, actors, and others say a TikTok ban could seriously hurt their businesses and are scrambling to create contingency plans
Washington Post
12:35 AM
Meta Quest Pro teardown: US parts account for 34% of the headset's estimated $440 in component costs, China 18%, South Korea 10%, Japan 3%, and 35% unidentified
Nikkei Asia
12:10 AM
Norway-based 1X, which is developing humanoid robots, raised a $23.5M Series A2 led by the OpenAI Startup Fund with participation from Tiger Global and others
Wired
Saturday, March 25, 2023
11:45 PM
Source: Elon Musk emailed Twitter employees offering stock grants at a ~$20B valuation, or 55% less than what he paid to buy the company
The Information
11:20 PM
The hacker of DeFi lending protocol Euler Finance returns 58,737 ETH, worth ~$102M, from the 96K ETH stolen in a flash-loan attack on March 13; EUL jumps ~27%
The Block
9:45 PM
How Meta could sidestep ATT's impairments by launching a mobile games store, as Apple reportedly prepares multiple app store support on iOS due to the EU's DMA
Mobile Dev Memo
7:55 PM
Microsoft releases Windows 10 Snip & Sketch and Windows 11 Snipping Tool updates to fix the “aCropalypse” bug used to reveal info edited out in some screenshots
BleepingComputer
6:05 PM
Replika restores erotic roleplay for users who signed up before February 1, after complaints from some who considered themselves “married” to chatbot companions
Reuters
4:15 PM
Q&A with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on AI's iPhone moment, the DGX Cloud service, the US' export controls, Nvidia's position in the stack in an LLM world, and more
Stratechery
2:50 PM
Email: Twitter offers four-year equity grants to staff, on top of legacy equity, that will start to vest after six months and plans a liquidity event in a year
Wall Street Journal
1:00 PM
Microsoft researchers claim GPT-4 showed early signs of AGI and performance close to human levels in tasks spanning coding, medicine, law, psychology, and more
VICE
12:00 PM
Some national security concerns about TikTok are valid, but a forced sale of its US operations may undermine the company's ability to fight adversarial threats
Techdirt
10:20 AM
In his first visit since 2020, Tim Cook praises Apple's “symbiotic kind of relationship” with China, amid the company's moves to diversify from the country
Financial Times
8:10 AM
LLMs will remove scholarly, creative, and economic software creation barriers, marking the industry's Gutenberg moment to unleash the next great technology wave
Irregular Ideas
5:05 AM
A look at Amazon's efforts to offset its shipping costs by raising Prime subscription prices, increasing the minimum purchase free shipping threshold, and more
Reuters
2:00 AM
An AI chatbots comparison test finds ChatGPT is the most verbally dextrous, Bing is best for getting information from the web, and Bard is surprisingly limited
The Verge
1:45 AM
A March 15 affidavit shows how the FBI arrested Conor Fitzpatrick, aka Pompompurin, the alleged BreachForums admin; the DOJ caused the forum “to go offline”
TechCrunch
1:30 AM
Sources: Microsoft threatened to cut rivals' Bing search index access over its use in their AI chat tools and warned at least two that they violated its terms
Bloomberg
12:45 AM
An investigation finds US homeowners associations teaming up with police to install Flock Safety's license plate surveillance cameras, without telling residents
The Intercept
12:20 AM
A TikTok ban would have to satisfy the most stringent form of First Amendment review as the ban would operate as a prior restraint on speech of would-be users
New York Times
Friday, March 24, 2023
8:45 PM
Databricks open sources Dolly, an LLM that the company says can be trained in less than three hours on one machine and is a clone of Stanford's Alpaca model
SiliconANGLE
8:24 PM
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, the author of Moore's Law, dies at 94
Intel
7:30 PM
A US federal judge rules in favor of four publishers in their copyright infringement case against the Internet Archive and its Controlled Digital Lending system
LJ Infodocket
6:35 PM
Sources: Fortra told its GoAnywhere customers that their data was safe after a ransomware attack by the Clop gang, but two said they received ransom demands
TechCrunch
4:40 PM
TikTok says Enes Freedom, a former NBA player critical of China, was banned for 12 days due to an error by US moderators before being reinstated on March 23
Washington Post
4:00 PM
OpenAI blames a bug in a Redis client open-source library for the March 20 ChatGPT history issue and exposure of 1.2% of ChatGPT Plus subscribers' personal info
BleepingComputer
3:10 PM
Sensor Tower: Twitter Blue had 385K+ subscribers on iOS and Android and made $11M on mobile in its first three months, including ~$8M from 246K US subscribers
TechCrunch
2:25 PM
A researcher finds Verification settings in Twitter's app showing that the company may be working on letting Blue subscribers hide their blue checkmark
The Verge
1:45 PM
Tether estimates the company will make $700M in profit in Q1, taking its excess reserves to back its USDT stablecoin to $1.66B, above $1B for the first time
CNBC
12:50 PM
ChatGPT set off a VC rush to invest in generative AI startups; PitchBook says AI startup investments grew from $1.5B in 2020 to $5.9B+ since the start of 2022
Reuters
11:45 AM
Sources: China released chip investor Chen Datong, detained in 2022 during a chip industry crackdown, as the country seeks experts to navigate western sanctions
Financial Times
11:00 AM
Nasdaq expects its custody services for digital assets to launch in Q2 2023, starting with bitcoin and ether, after announcing the project in September 2022
Bloomberg
10:10 AM
Axios HQ, the software business spun off from Axios in 2022, raised a $20M Series A at a nearly $100M valuation to build communication tools with OpenAI's help
Wall Street Journal
9:20 AM
The UK CMA narrows its probe of Microsoft's $69B Activision Blizzard bid, saying new evidence “provisionally alleviates” concerns about UK game console supply
TechCrunch
9:15 AM
Xiaomi reports Q4 revenue down 22.8% YoY to ~$9.6B and net income down 67.3% to ~$213M; 2022 revenue fell 14.7% to ~$40.7B and net income fell 61.4% to ~$1.2B
Reuters
8:50 AM
Sources: in 2018, Elon Musk said OpenAI lagged Google and cut ties after his offer to run it was rejected; Altman took no equity in OpenAI's for-profit entity
Semafor
8:35 AM
France plans to use large-scale AI-based video cameras for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics, potentially becoming the first EU country to legalize AI surveillance
Politico
8:10 AM
Meituan reports Q4 revenue up 21.4% YoY to ~$8.76B, above estimates of ~$8.43B, and a ~$157M net loss; core local commerce revenue grew 17.4% YoY to ~$6.33B
Reuters
8:00 AM
Binance suspended spot markets for two hours on Friday after a bug emerged related to the trailing stop loss feature
CoinDesk
6:45 AM
Current and former Twitch staff describe how the service lost its way: out-of-touch leaders, losing big creators, cost cutting, many irrelevant ads, and more
Washington Post
Thursday, March 23, 2023
10:50 PM
CISA releases Untitled Goose Tool, an open-source Python-based utility to detect signs of malicious activity in Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 environments
BleepingComputer
9:45 PM
Austin-based quantum computing startup Strangeworks raised a $24M Series A led by Hitachi Ventures with participation from IBM and Raytheon Technologies
SiliconHills
8:50 PM
Binance's public chatrooms show some employees and support volunteers helping customers bypass China's crypto ban, including evading the company's KYC checks
CNBC
8:25 PM
Warsaw-based Vue Storefront, which lets front-end developers build composable e-commerce sites, raised a $20M Series A extension led by Felix Capital
TechCrunch
7:10 PM
Twitter plans to wind down its legacy verified program, first introduced in June 2009, and remove legacy verified checkmarks starting on April 1, 2023
Variety
6:20 PM
Utah Governor Spencer Cox signs two bills regulating social media, requiring all users verify their age and parents give permission before minors open accounts
Salt Lake Tribune
5:45 PM
US prosecutors in New York charge Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon with eight counts, including securities fraud, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy
Bloomberg
4:20 PM
Shou Chew's answers to hostile questioning did little to calm the bipartisan fury aimed at TikTok, instead giving critics more fuel to insist the US ban the app
Bloomberg
4:15 PM
Twitter Blue rolls out globally, but the subscription service is still missing promised features like prioritized ranking in conversations and half as many ads
The Verge
4:02 PM
Montenegro says police detained Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon when he tried to fly to Dubai using falsified Costa Rican travel documents
Bloomberg
3:30 PM
Why LLMs aren't a dumb fad like crypto, but the biggest thing since the World Wide Web, and on the coding front, the biggest thing since IDEs and Stack Overflow
Sourcegraph Blog
2:35 PM
Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Wolfram, Zapier, and others release the first third-party ChatGPT plugins
TechCrunch
1:35 PM
OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT plugins, including two of its own, a web browser and a code interpreter, and open sources the code for a knowledgebase retrieval plugin
OpenAI
12:45 PM
TikTok CEO Shou Chew tells Congress that “after Project Texas is done” China-based ByteDance employees will no longer be able to access US TikTok data
CNBC
12:25 PM
Snap unveils AR Enterprise Services, offering its AR Lenses and Filters to businesses, and says 250M+ people out of 375M DAUs engage with AR on Snapchat daily
TechCrunch
11:50 AM
China “firmly opposes” a forced sale of TikTok, warning such a move would involve “technology export” and would “seriously damage” investor confidence in the US
Financial Times
10:50 AM
The YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips was hacked on Thursday and posted videos for crypto scams to its 15.3M subscribers, the latest crypto scam breach on YouTube
The Verge
10:06 AM
Do Kwon Arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister
CoinDesk
9:51 AM
The FTC proposes banning difficult-to-cancel subscriptions via “click to cancel” rules requiring companies to make ending a subscription as simple as signing up
The Verge
9:25 AM
A recap of TikTok CEO Shou Chew's testimony before Congress, in which he struggled to address national security concerns over ByteDance's ownership of TikTok
Washington Post
8:52 AM
Block drops 10%+ after Hindenburg Research discloses a short position and alleges the company overstated user numbers and understated customer acquisition costs
Reuters
8:35 AM
OIG report: US officials working on Login.gov, used by dozens of sites, rejected verifying IDs via facial recognition over algorithmic bias, breaking NIST rules
Wired
8:12 AM
Sources: Apple plans to spend $1B per year to produce movies for release in thousands of theaters, a big increase from years past, seeking to grow TV+ awareness
Bloomberg
8:05 AM
Researchers warn of “industrial capture” in AI as companies entrench their power; companies' share of the biggest AI models grew from 11% in 2010 to 96% in 2021
Financial Times
7:47 AM
Accenture plans to lay off 19,000 employees, or ~2.5% of its workforce, and lowers its annual forecasts, as the global economic slowdown weighs on IT spending
Reuters
7:15 AM
South Korea-based luxury goods resale marketplace Kream raised a ~$168M Series C led by Altos Ventures at a ~$742M valuation, up from ~$306M in October 2021
TechCrunch
6:41 AM
Sources: Apple considers bidding for the streaming rights to a range of English soccer games, including to show Premier League games in the UK, following Amazon
Bloomberg
6:10 AM
Intel, IBM, Nvidia, and other chip companies join industrial materials businesses in lobbying against proposed clampdowns on “forever chemicals” across the US
Financial Times
5:31 AM
Chatbot startup Character.AI raised $150M led by a16z at a $1B valuation, after a $43M seed in December 2021, and plans to raise more from “strategic partners”
New York Times
4:55 AM
Munich-based IntegrityNext, a service that helps companies audit their suppliers for ESG compliance, raised €100M from EQT Growth, its first outside investment
TechCrunch
4:35 AM
A look at Replika's decision to block sexual content in its AI companion chatbot; 60% of paying customers had a romantic element in their Replika relationship
Bloomberg
3:45 AM
Toshiba plans to support a ~$15.3B takeover offer from a coalition of ~20 companies including Japan Industrial Partners; JIP is expected to take Toshiba private
Nikkei Asia
3:30 AM
Sources: Arm seeks to raise chip design prices by charging device makers based on the value of a device instead of charging chipmakers based on a chip's value
Financial Times
2:40 AM
Canva debuts AI tools including Magic Design, which creates personalized templates from images, and Magic Presentation, which creates slideshows from prompts
Forbes
2:25 AM
A profile of TikTok CEO Shou Chew, a Singaporean army reservist and a former Goldman Sachs banker trying to “clarify” some things before a skeptical Congress
Wall Street Journal
1:10 AM
A look at RightWingGPT, an experimental AI model fine-tuned by a researcher, who claims ChatGPT has a liberal bias, to answer questions with a conservative bent
New York Times
12:05 AM
Court filings: FTX plans to recover $460M in assets, including $404M in cash, of the $475M seed capital transferred from Alameda to hedge fund Modulo in 2022
CoinDesk
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
11:35 PM
Meta launches an updated WhatsApp app for Windows that loads faster and enables group video calls with up to eight people and audio calls with up to 32 people
Meta
11:05 PM
Sam Altman says OpenAI fixed a “significant issue” in ChatGPT after a bug in an open-source library let some users see the titles of other users' chat history
Reuters
10:35 PM
Jakarta-based Kredivo, formerly FinAccel, whose services include BNPL, personal loans, credit cards, and neobanking, raised a $270M Series D led by Mizuho Bank
TechCrunch
8:15 PM
Singapore-based crypto exchange Bitget acquires a controlling stake in Cayman Islands-based crypto wallet startup BitKeep, investing $30M at a $300M valuation
The Block
5:55 PM
Filing: Coinbase received an SEC notice warning the exchange of potential US securities law violations that could lead to enforcement actions; COIN drops 10%+
CNBC
5:20 PM
A poll of 1,027 US adults: 41% support a TikTok ban, 25% oppose it, and 71% are concerned that ByteDance is based in China; 17% of US daily users support a ban
Washington Post
4:25 PM
Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and other celebrities agree to pay a combined $400K to settle SEC charges over promoting TRX and BTT without disclosing compensation
CNBC
3:45 PM
The US SEC sues Tron founder Justin Sun and his companies for the alleged “unregistered offer and sale of crypto asset securities” TRX and BTT, fraud, and more
CoinDesk
2:50 PM
Microsoft launches Loop, its Notion and Asana competitor, in preview, letting users collaborate in shared Microsoft 365 workspaces on the web, Android, and iOS
Windows Central
1:40 PM
Job listings site Indeed lays off ~2,200 people, or ~15% of its headcount, citing falling HR Tech revenue; Tokyo-based Recruit acquired Indeed in September 2012
The Information
12:25 PM
After the Russia-linked Clop ransomware gang claimed to hit 130 companies, victims are coming forward, many of which used Fortra's GoAnywhere file transfer tool
TechCrunch
12:15 PM
Microsoft announces a toolkit for developers to measure Xbox games' energy consumption “to the nearest millisecond”, helping the company establish a baseline
Bloomberg
12:00 PM
Sources: Google, Meta, and Apple want Congress to limit Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, expiring at 2023's end if not reauthorized
Bloomberg
11:26 AM
Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins says Midjourney banned him after he made images of a Donald Trump arrest; the company banned the word “arrested” in its tool
BuzzFeed News
11:10 AM
A look at ByteDance's and TikTok's lobbying before Shou Zi Chew's hearing, including Axios ads and private lawmaker meetings, mirroring Meta's well-worn tactics
Washington Post
10:45 AM
Sources: Meta rehires veteran manager Nick Grudin, who left to join NFT startup Dapper Labs in August 2022, to oversee relationships with media and creators
The Information
10:25 AM
Amazon introduces new Fire TVs and the cheaper TV lineup 2-Series, says 200M+ Fire TV devices have been sold, and expands Luna to the UK, Germany, and Canada
The Verge
10:20 AM
The UK CMA says Broadcom's $69B VMware acquisition may make servers more expensive, giving five working days to address concerns and warning of an investigation
Financial Times
10:11 AM
GitHub announces Copilot X, a new Copilot version with chat and voice features using OpenAI's GPT-4 to help with certain coding tasks, available via a waitlist
Bloomberg
10:03 AM
Mozilla announces Mozilla.ai, an AI-focused startup with a $30M seed from the Mozilla Foundation to create a “trustworthy”, independent open-source AI stack
TechCrunch
9:30 AM
Memo: Spotify has spent less than 10% of its $100M Creator Equity Fund, announced in February 2022 to promote diversity in music after the Joe Rogan controversy
Bloomberg
7:10 AM
Inside TSMC's facilities in Taiwan, where Fab 18 makes 1 quintillion transistors for Apple every six months, and an interview with Chairman Mark Liu
Wired
6:45 AM
The US will find banning TikTok difficult due to its 150M+ US users, political ramifications for Biden including losing young voters, legal challenges, and more
New York Times
6:25 AM
Okcoin suspended trading of CityCoins' NYCCoin and MiamiCoin on the Stacks protocol last week, citing low liquidity; both coins had received mayoral support
Bloomberg