Techmeme
March 16, 2024, 4:00 PM

Top News

Reuters:
Sources: SpaceX's Starshield is building a network of spy satellites under a classified, $1.8B contract with the US spy agency National Reconnaissance Office  —  SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency …
Axios:
A look at a potential TikTok US sale, with an estimated valuation of $100B, or $40B without the algorithm, as Steven Mnuchin and others form investor groups  —  - TikTok's U.S. revenue reportedly was between $16 billion and $20 billion in 2023, but CEO Shou Zi Chew has said the company is in the red.
New York Times:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
LinkedIn confirms it is working on adding puzzle-based games; a researcher says it is testing ranking companies in the games based on the scores of employees  —  LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social platform, has made a name for itself primarily as a platform for people looking to network …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: US prosecutors in Virginia, with FDA's help, are investigating whether Meta's platforms are facilitating and profiting from the illegal sale of drugs  —  Federal prosecutors are looking into whether platforms including Facebook facilitate and profit from illicit sale of drugs
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Researchers detail ArtPrompt, a jailbreak that uses ASCII art to elicit harmful responses from aligned LLMs such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2  —  LLMs are trained to block harmful responses.  Old-school images can override those rules.  —  Researchers have discovered …
Elle Hardy / New Republic:
How evangelicals proselytize using Bless Every Home, an app that lets users create neighborhood maps and data tables based on people's religion and ethnicity  —  The future of proselytizing—and surveillance—has arrived.  An app called Bless Every Home, which has been backed …
Tim Higgins / Wall Street Journal:
How Elon Musk courted Don Lemon to show that X isn't a right-wing tool, as the breakup highlights Linda Yaccarino's thankless task of trying to assure brands  —  Unexpected split leaves X CEO Linda Yaccarino with another loss  —  Don Lemon got to see both sides of Elon Musk.
Matt Novak / Gizmodo:
Filing: SBF wrote a Google doc in which he floated “bad ideas” to improve his image, including going on Tucker Carlson and coming out “against the woke agenda”  —  SBF's brainstorming notes included lines like “Come out against the woke agenda.”  —  Are you a billionaire in trouble?
Bloomberg.com:
Two of the UK's biggest supermarket chains, Tesco and Sainsbury's, were hit with technical issues on Saturday; Sainsbury's blames a software update  —  Two of the UK's biggest supermarket chains - Tesco and Sainsbury's - were hit with technical issues on Saturday.
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Game developer Scopely says Monopoly Go! crossed $2B in revenue in February 2024, just 10 months after launching and three months after hitting $1B in revenue  —  Scopely announced that Monopoly Go has generated $2 billion in revenue just 10 months after launch and three months after hitting $1 billion.

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Featured Podcasts

Lenny's Podcast:
How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft)
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More News

James O'Donnell / MIT Technology Review:
Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch:
Andrew Hayward / Decrypt:

Earlier Picks

Tom Henderson / Insider Gaming:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Dan Primack / Axios:
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac: