Techmeme
December 8, 2023, 4:00 AM

Top News

Parmy Olson / Bloomberg:
Google's Gemini video demo of its multimodal capabilities wasn't carried out in real time or in voice; the model was shown still images and given text prompts  —  The tech giant's latest AI model is only marginally better than the one from OpenAI that's been out for eight months.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Users say Google's Gemini Pro is loath to comment on potentially controversial news topics, fails to get basic facts right, and struggles with some coding tasks  —  This week, Google took the wraps off of Gemini, its new flagship generative AI model meant to power a range of products …
Wall Street Journal:
The US and UK governments jointly accuse Russia's FSB of orchestrating a wide-ranging, global hacking campaign since 2015 to interfere in British elections  —  The cyberattacks also allegedly took aim at U.S. energy networks and American spies  —  LONDON—The U.S. and U.K. governments …
Jessica Lyons Hardcastle / The Register:
A researcher says a years-old Bluetooth authentication flaw lets attackers inject keystrokes to run arbitrary commands on Apple, Android, and some Linux devices  —  Issue has been around since at least 2012  —  A years-old Bluetooth authentication bypass vulnerability allows miscreants to connect to Apple …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Spotify says CFO Paul Vogel plans to leave on March 31, 2024, and launches a search for a successor; Daniel Ek wants a CFO “with a different mix of experiences”  —  Spotify said chief financial officer Paul Vogel will leave the company next year and that it has launched a search to find a replacement.
Maxwell Zeff / Gizmodo:
X rolls out xAI's snarky, anti-woke chatbot Grok to X Premium+ users; X CEO Linda Yaccarino describes Grok as “the ultimate ride or die”  —  Select users with X Premium Plus received access to the AI starting Thursday.  —  Elon Musk's snarky, anti-woke chatbot, Grok …
Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
A look at the technical issues Meta faced as it developed E2EE for Messenger, including creating an encrypted storage protocol and re-architecting chat features  —  Mark Zuckerberg personally promised that the privacy feature would launch by default on Messenger and Instagram chat.
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Meta rolls out tags on Threads, offering support for multiple words and spaces, and no # symbol; posts can only have one tag and the tag view is the search view  —  Tags — basically hashtags with a twist — are now rolling out globally on Threads, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Thursday.
Wall Street Journal:
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Montenegro Justice Minister Andrej Milovic has privately said he plans to extradite Do Kwon to the US rather than South Korea to face criminal charges  —  Alexander Osipovich and Marko Vešović  —  Montenegro's top justice official has privately said he plans …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cape:
Most carriers track everything.  Cape doesn't.  —  Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more.  Switch today and get 29% off for life.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
Pro tips: 5 ways to close WhatsApp leads in Zoho CRM  —  This is a guest post by Orkhan Jafarli, Growth PM at TimelinesAI.More buyers now reach out on WhatsApp before they ever fill out a form.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
What Happens If AI Fails?, Subprime Data Center Crisis, How Bad Can SpaceX Get?
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Hard Fork:
OpenAI Models Go Rogue + Kimi K3 Freakout + A.I. Superforecasting
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
The Talk Show With John Gruber:
'A Scam Held Together With Patriotism and Golden Paint', With Quinn Nelson
The director's commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.
Subscribe to The Talk Show With John Gruber.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Abridge's Shiv Rao: The Doctor Founder Taking On Microsoft In Healthcare AI
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Great Chat:
Too big to laugh: how tech lost its sense of humor
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:00 AM ET, December 8, 2023.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Kaya Yurieff / The Information:
Duncan Riley / SiliconANGLE:

Earlier Picks

Ben Weiss / Fortune:
Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE:
Financial Times:
More: New York TimesMastodon: @jalefkowit@octodon.socialX: @thorstenbenner and @neilos49
LinkedIn: Aaron Halegua and Sasja BeslikForums: Hacker News
Wall Street Journal:
Jim Norman / Nintendo Life:
Drew Harwell / Washington Post: