Techmeme
November 4, 2023, 4:40 PM

Top News

Alex Konrad / Forbes:
Emails: X has begun work on an account handle marketplace for purchasing handles left unused, requesting a flat fee of $50K from potential buyers in some cases  —  Rumored to be in the works for the past year, the initiative appears to have begun rolling out recently, with email solicitations being sent to potential buyers.
New York Times:
Sources: GM spent an average of $588M a quarter on Cruise in the past year, up 42% YoY, and staff intervened to assist Cruise's vehicles every 2.5 to five miles  —  Cruise has hired a law firm to investigate how it responded to regulators, as its cars sit idle and questions grow about its C.E.O.'s expansion plans.
Alex Cranz / The Verge:
An eulogy for the Touch Bar, which held incredible promise but never got out of the proof-of-concept phase due to a lack of interest from developers and Apple  —  The Touch Bar was too ahead of its time.  This happens occasionally.  We finally reach the point we can make a really cool idea …
Andrew Hayward / Decrypt:
OpenSea lays off ~50% of staff and is moving to “OpenSea 2.0”; after laying off 20% of its workforce in July 2022, the NFT marketplace said 230 staff remained  —  A company representative told Decrypt that approximately 50% of employees were impacted across the company.
Gabor Cselle / Gabor Cselle on Medium:
The CEO of Pebble, formerly T2, on why the social network failed: not prioritizing building an app, Threads' launch, not enough interesting content, and more  —  Tl;dr We tried to build a Twitter alternative from scratch, starting a few weeks after Elon Musk took over Twitter and laid off half the company.
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Byju's files much-delayed financial results: $270.9M operating loss and revenue of $429.18M for FY ending March 2022, missing revenue projections of $1.25B  —  Indian edtech giant Byju's said on Saturday that revenue of its core business, its largest, in the financial year ending March 2022 stood …
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
A security researcher says that a Flipper Zero device can carry out DoS attacks on iPhones running iOS 17 by continuously sending Bluetooth pairing requests  —  No cure yet for a popular iPhone attack, except for turning off Bluetooth.  —  One morning two weeks ago, security researcher Jeroen van der Ham …
NBC News:
On Instagram, journalists and creators inside Gaza see a surge in followers as they document the Israel-Hamas war, even as Meta has broadly moved away from news  —  One journalist has added more than 12 million followers.  The work highlights some of the challenges and dangers of covering the conflict.
More: SPJ News.  Threads: @jasonabbruzzese and @jasonabbruzzese.  Bluesky: @mattnavarra.com.  X: @jasonabbruzzese.  LinkedIn: Marc Owen Jones
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft employees will keep free access to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate after Phil Spencer stepped in to reverse the company's plans to remove the benefit  —  Microsoft was planning to remove a free Xbox Game Pass Ultimate benefit for most of its 238,000 employees in January …

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