Techmeme
October 16, 2023, 8:00 AM

Top News

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
A look at Apple's recent executive promotions; sources: a sub-$2,500 Vision Pro won't have EyeSight and M3-based MacBook Pros could come in early or spring 2024  —  Still, it's losing a top hardware executive.  Also: There are fresh details on efforts to lower the price of the Vision Pro …
Kate Conger / New York Times:
Australia fined X ~$384K and warned Google after the companies did not give enough info on their efforts to fight CSAM, despite a law requiring such disclosures  —  The service formerly known as Twitter told Australian regulators that its automated detection of abusive material had declined after Elon Musk bought it.
Giulio Piovaccari / Reuters:
Ferrari begins accepting crypto payments for its cars in the US and plans to add the option for European customers in Q1 2024; Ferrari sold 13,200 cars in 2022  —  Ferrari (RACE.MI) has started to accept payment in cryptocurrency for its luxury sports cars in the U.S. and will extend the scheme …
Ash Parrish / The Verge:
Mojang announces 300M+ copies of Minecraft sold in ~15 years; Rockstar's GTA V is the second best-selling game ever after reportedly selling ~185M in ~10 years  —  Today, it adds more down to that particular feather in its cap with the announcement that it has sold a staggering 300 million copies.
Angus Berwick / Wall Street Journal:
How Moscow-based crypto exchange Garantex became a major money laundering channel for cybercriminals and terrorist groups like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad  —  Garantex's international pipeline helps defy Treasury sanctions by channeling rubles to crypto to dollars.  Customers line up with bags of cash.
Elizabeth Dwoskin / Washington Post:
How social media is inducing an Israel-Hamas fog of war surpassing previous Gaza clashes, shaping how panicked citizens and a global public view the conflict  —  The barrage of false images, memes, videos and posts — mostly generated from within the region itself — is making it difficult to assess what is real.
Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media:
Some AI image detecting tools are labeling real photographs from the Israel-Hamas war as fake, creating what an expert calls a “second level of disinformation”  —  Content warning: This story contains graphic images of violence.  —  A free AI image detector that's been covered …
Stephanie Bodoni / Bloomberg:
TikTok confirms appealing a €345M teen privacy fine by EU regulators from September in the EU General Court and is also locally challenging an order by Ireland  —  - Chinese-owned platform contests EU-level, Irish decisions  — Unit faces intense scrutiny of child safeguarding practices
More: Reuters and TNW
Thomas Claburn / The Register:
Researchers find that a modest amount of fine-tuning can bypass safety efforts aiming to prevent LLMs such as OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo from spewing toxic content  —  OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo chatbot defenses dissolve with ‘20 cents’ of API tickling  —  The “guardrails” created to prevent large language models …
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:

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More News

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Earlier Picks

Kate Irwin / Decrypt:
Jared Newman / Fast Company:
Brendan Bordelon / Politico:
Cecilia D'Anastasio / Bloomberg: