Techmeme
December 19, 2023, 6:45 PM

Top News

Ben Glickman / Wall Street Journal:
Google agrees to pay $700M and make app store changes, like offering an alternative billing system, to settle a 2021 antitrust lawsuit by 36 US states and DC  —  Agreement with coalition of states resolves antitrust litigation related to app store  —  Google parent Alphabet agreed …
Eva Dou / Washington Post:
In Google's $700M settlement for Utah et al v. Google, an estimated 102M eligible US Android users will split $630M, leaving $70M for other related claims  —  Google will pay consumers from all 50 states to settle a lawsuit over its app store practices  —  Tens of millions of U.S. consumers …
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Comcast's Xfinity says hackers breached one of its Citrix servers in October 2023, two weeks after Citrix issued a patch, and stole data on 35,879,455 people  —  Comcast Cable Communications, doing business as Xfinity, disclosed on Monday that attackers who breached one of its Citrix servers …
Bloomberg:
Adobe's failed Figma acquisition leaves Adobe with ~$6B in cash, likely to be used for AI investment and stock buybacks; ADBE jumped 75%+ in 2023 on AI interest  —  - Startups like Canva, Figma and OpenAI remain a risk to growth  — Investors banking on AI to boost Adobe's customers and sales
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Meir Orbach / CTech:
Okta is acquiring Israeli cybersecurity company Spera, which raised a $10M seed in March 2023; source: the deal is worth ~$100M-$130M, contingent on milestones  —  The American identity and access management giant is making its first purchase in Israel.  Spera, which raised $10 million …
David Hollingworth / Cyber Daily:
Hackers post 1.67TB of Insomniac Games' internal data, including for an upcoming Wolverine game, HR files, Slack screenshots, and a Marvel-Sony X-Men agreement  —  The Rhysida ransomware gang publishes 98 per cent of leaked data minutes after the ransom deadline passes - Wolverine game files included.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Microsoft Copilot can now compose songs, including lyrics, instruments, and voices, from a sentence, due to a new integration with generative AI music app Suno  —  Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft's AI-powered chatbot, can now compose songs thanks to an integration with gen AI music app Suno.
Carly Page / TechCrunch:
The FBI, the UK, Denmark, Germany, Spain, and Australia seize ransomware gang ALPHV's dark web leak website; the US also seized “several websites” run by ALPHV  —  An international group of law enforcement agencies have seized the dark web leak site of the notorious ransomware gang known as ALPHV, or BlackCat.
David Heaney / UploadVR:
Meta updates its OpenXR extension with tongue tracking, letting developers use the feature in the Quest Pro, but hasn't added support to the Meta Avatars SDK  —  Quest Pro's face tracking now includes your tongue.  —  In our review of Quest Pro last year, we pointed out how sticking …
Emilia David / The Verge:
Stability AI debuts Stability AI Membership, with free, $20/month, and custom pricing enterprise tiers, limiting commercial use of its models to the paid tiers  —  Stability AI, the maker of the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, is now offering a subscription service that standardizes …
More: 9to5Toys
Anissa Gardizy / The Information:
Sources: AWS plans to overhaul its sales team as it aims to increase the share of Fortune 1,000 firms spending over $10M/year on AWS, from less than 20% to 80%  —  Matt Garman, head of sales at Amazon Web Services, plans to reorganize his more than 60,000-person team to address problems …
Pranshu Verma / Washington Post:
NewsGuard: since May 2023, websites hosting AI-created fake news articles have grown from 49 to 600+; some post “hundreds if not thousands of articles” per day  —  AI is making it easy for anyone to create propaganda outlets, producing content that can be hard to differentiate from real news
Sheila Dang / Reuters:
Meta's Oversight Board says Meta erred in removing two Israel-Hamas war videos as they were valuable to understanding human suffering, its first expedited cases  —  Meta Platform's (META.O) Oversight Board said on Tuesday that the social media company erred in removing two videos depicting hostages …

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Earlier Picks

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