Techmeme
December 19, 2023, 7:30 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:
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 …
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 …
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.
Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:
Pharmacy chain Rite Aid must stop using facial recognition for five years as part of a settlement with the US FTC, which said the tech falsely flagged customers  —  - FTC says chain's surveillance system falsely flagged customers  — Bankrupt pharmacy chain will stop using system, delete images
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 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.
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 …
Kanishka Singh / Reuters:
A US judge approves a previously announced settlement between Binance and the CFTC, asking Binance to pay $2.7B and Changpeng Zhao to pay $150M to the regulator  —  A U.S. court entered an order against crypto exchange Binance and its former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, approving billions of dollars …
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

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.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
App Spotlight: Clean Contacts Pro for Zoho CRM  —  App Spotlight brings you hand-picked solutions that enhance your Zoho apps and tools.  Visit Zoho Marketplace to explore all of our apps, integrations …
IDrive:
IDrive Autonomy: low-cost L2+ driver assistance with AI  —  L2+ driver assistance with a scalable AI stack built for automotive companies and laying the foundation for the autonomous future.

Featured Podcasts

Grit:
The AI Race Has a Leaderboard | Arena CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
Why companies are becoming a series of loops | Anish Acharya (a16z)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
GPT-6 & OpenAI's Comeback, Hugging Face Attack Debate, Ballmer's Scandalous Legacy
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:
The A.I. Mob That Attacked Hugging Face + METR's Ajeya Cotra
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.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Data Centers, Elon Musk, and the New Politics of Tech, with David Weigel
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
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 7:30 PM ET, December 19, 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

Earlier Picks

Sandali Handagama / CoinDesk:
Hannah Schoenbaum / Associated Press:
Sheila Dang / Reuters: