Techmeme
March 5, 2024, 12:50 PM

Top News

Emma Roth / The Verge:
Meta confirms a technical issue caused an outage affecting Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Meta Quest logins, and more, for over two hours  —  Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are all experiencing issues.  The three Meta-owned platforms aren't working for many users, with the widespread outage seeming to start around 10AM ET.
Financial Times:
As Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft comply with the EU's DMA before March 7, experts are skeptical its rules will have the desired effect  —  This week is the deadline for large online platforms to comply with new EU regulations on competition.  Too little too late, say some
Reuters:
A BlackCat ransomware gang website shows a takedown notice; the UK NCA denies involvement and experts suggest an exit scam after an alleged UnitedHealth payment  —  A website used by hackers responsible for a breach at UnitedHealth Group (UNH.N) has been replaced by a notice saying it has been seized by international law enforcement.
CoinDesk:
Bitcoin surpassed $69K, eclipsing its previous all-time high set on November 10, 2021, with US spot bitcoin ETFs a likely catalyst of the latest bull run  —  The success of the spot ETFs which opened for business on January 11 was the catalyst for this latest bull run for the world's largest crypto.
Counterpoint Research:
Zac Bowden / Windows Central:
Sources: Microsoft plans to unveil an OLED Surface Pro 10 and a Surface Laptop 6, both available with Intel Core Ultra or Snapdragon X Elite chips, on March 21  —  Microsoft's first AI PCs will be unveiled on March 21, ahead of next-gen Windows 11 AI features coming this fall.  —  What you need to know
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
The US Treasury sanctions spyware group Intellexa Consortium's founder and one of his business partners, the first US sanctions on people over spyware misuse  —  The U.S. government announced Tuesday sanctions against the founder of the notorious spyware company Intellexa and one of his business partners.
Emilia David / The Verge:
OpenAI updates ChatGPT with a Read Aloud feature that auto-detects 37 languages and reads GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 responses out loud on the web, Android, and iOS  —  OpenAI's new Read Aloud feature for ChatGPT could come in handy when users are on the go by reading its responses in one of five voice options out loud to users.
TechCrunch:
X's audio and video calls, which are on by default, are peer-to-peer, revealing users' IP addresses to each other unless they toggle an enhanced privacy setting  —  The new X calling feature can hurt your privacy  —  In his quest to turn a simple and functioning Twitter app into X …
Allison Johnson / The Verge:
Nothing debuts the 6.7" Phone (2a), its first budget phone, with a 5,000mAh battery and a MediaTek chip, starting at £319 for 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage  —  Budget phones tend to be pretty forgettable, but the Nothing Phone 2A isn't your average budget phone — that much is obvious just looking at it.
Benj Edwards / Ars Technica:
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
Financial Times:
Jennifer Elias / CNBC:
At an event, Sergey Brin said Google “definitely messed up” Gemini's image generation debut and it's “not our intention” for Gemini to lean left “in many cases”  —  - Google's Sergey Brin spoke to a roomful of entrepreneurs over the weekend at the “AGI House” in Hillsborough, California.
Financial Times:
UK digital bank Monzo raised $430M led by Alphabet's CapitalG at a $5B valuation, up from $4.5B in December 2021, and plans to use funds to expand in the US  —  London-based digital bank raised $430mn from investors including CapitalG and HongShan  —  Monzo has secured a fresh round …

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:
Zoho Notebook: The free iPad note-taking app every student needs  —  If you're a student with an iPad, you already have one of the best note-taking devices in your hands.  The question is, does your app actually do it justice?
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

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.
Big Technology Podcast:
OpenAI's Bots Break Containment and Hack Hugging Face Autonomously — With Alex Stamos
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.
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.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Substack Wants To Become A Social Network; Beehiiv Wants To Stay Invisible
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.
Training Data:
Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming 'Dark Factory' Where Software Builds Itself
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
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 12:50 PM ET, March 5, 2024.

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

Bloomberg:
Lawrence Bonk / Engadget:
Alexa Corse / Wall Street Journal:
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac: