Techmeme
September 29, 2023, 7:15 PM

Top News

Jacquelyn Melinek / TechCrunch:
Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
Letterboxd's founders sell a majority stake to Canadian company Tiny; a source says the deal values the film-focused social network with ~10M users at $50M+  —  Two designers from New Zealand built a wildly popular social network for movie buffs.  Now, they're cashing in (and sticking around for the sequel).
William Gallagher / AppleInsider:
Report: Apple uses two microscopic QR codes on iPhone displays to track defects, which has helped cut its suppliers' faulty screen report rates from 30% to 10%  —  Apple spent millions to add a barcode to iPhone displays in order to save being charged hundreds of millions by manufacturers claiming faulty screens that may not have been.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Apple executives met Chinese officials in recent months to discuss new rules forcing Apple to ban apps whose operators are not registered with China  —  Country's push to register foreign apps threatens to remove Facebook, Instagram and X from iPhone App Store in China
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
Meta quietly unveils Llama 2 Long, which has been trained with longer sequences, outperforming GPT-3.5 Turbo and Claude 2 when responding to long user prompts  —  Meta Platforms showed off a bevy of new AI features for its consumer-facing services Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp …
Natasha Mascarenhas / The Information:
Sources: Jasper, which offers an AI writing tool for marketers, cut its $140M ARR projections for 2023 by 30%+ and its internal valuation by 20% from $1.5B  —  Jasper AI, an early darling of the generative artificial intelligence boom, has cut the internal value of its common shares 20% …
Jonathan Greig / The Record:
Progress Software, the company behind the widely exploited MOVEit file transfer tool, patches critical vulnerabilities in its WS_FTP Server data transfer tool  —  The company behind a popular file transfer service that was exploited by ransomware hackers has announced a new set of vulnerabilities affecting another file transfer tool.
Elizabeth Pineau / Reuters:
French authorities say they approved Apple's iPhone 12 software update that addresses radiation level concerns; Apple submitted the update on September 26  —  French authorities said on Friday they had approved Apple's AAPL.O software update of its iPhone 12 after a row over radiation levels of the device …
Washington Post:
The Supreme Court agrees to hear two cases concerning whether Florida and Texas can restrict social media companies from removing political posts or accounts  —  The Supreme Court on Friday said it would wade into the future of free speech online and decide whether laws passed in Texas …
Reuters:
Intel begins chip production using extreme ultraviolet lithography machines at its $18.5B Ireland plant, its first high-volume location for its 7nm process  —  Chipmaker Intel (INTC.O) said on Friday it had begun high-volume production using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
BeReal says its app has 25M+ DAUs, up from 20M in October 2022, disputing a Similarweb report estimating that BeReal's MAUs declined to 16.06M in August 2023  —  Just under a year ago, the buzzy new social app BeReal looked to be on the rise, with reportedly 20 million users launching the app every day to snap their candid photos.
More: Gizmodo

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