Techmeme
March 31, 2024, 1:00 AM

Top News

Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
AT&T confirms data dumped online appears to be from 2019 or earlier and has personal data of 7.6M current and 65.4M former account holders, resets passcodes  —  US telco giant takes action after 2019 data breach  —  Phone giant AT&T is reseting customer account passcodes after a huge cache …
Mike Larkin / Security Boulevard:
Microsoft engineer Andres Freund accidentally found the malicious code in versions of the XZ Utils compression tool, likely preventing thousands of infections  —  Yesterday's discovery of the xz backdoor was an accident.  But what a fortunate accident it was.
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Researchers find malicious code in versions of the compression tool XZ Utils that were incorporated into Linux distributions from Red Hat, Debian, and others  —  Malicious code planted in xz Utils has been circulating for more than a month.  —  Researchers have found a malicious backdoor …
More: oss-security, Rob Mensching, lcamtuf's thing, Red Hat, Evan Boehs, Cybersecurity …, Debian bug tracking system, 404 Media, Debian Mailing Lists, BleepingComputer, The Register, openSUSE News, LWN.net, Arch Linux, oss-security, The Register, The Record, Security Boulevard, The New Stack, Security Affairs, Cyber Kendra, The Stack, National Vulnerability …, Hackaday, Help Net Security, SC Media, Dark Reading, in which jules writes, Decipher, 9to5Linux, The Stack, CRN, BetaNews, and CRN
Mariella Moon / Engadget:
X says it is funding a lawsuit filed by Chloe Happe against her ex-employer Block, after being allegedly fired for her X posts about refugees and trans people  —  Happe accused Block of terminating her for expressing views Block didn't agree with.  —  X is funding a lawsuit filed by Chloe Happe …
Wall Street Journal:
Discord plans to start showing gaming ads from next week, called Sponsored Quests and offering rewards for in-game tasks; users can turn them off in settings  —  The chat platform, which has long avoided advertising, is latest tech company to lean into paid promotions
Benj Edwards / Ars Technica:
Victoria Song / The Verge:
As Gmail turns 20 on April 1, a look at its impact on online communication and its future as other messaging apps have come to dominate how we communicate  —  Gmail revolutionized email with fast search and a whole gigabyte of storage.  But where's it headed next?
Washington Post:
A look at Steven Mnuchin's TikTok plans; sources say his proposal to buy TikTok without its export-blocked algorithm and rebuild it from scratch is far-fetched  —  His proposal to buy the app without its algorithm from its Chinese owner has drawn skeptical reactions, including from those he's pitched
Podnews:
Survey of Americans aged 12+: 47% of have listened to a podcast in the last month, up 12% YoY, 76% listened to online audio in the past month, and more  —  The portion of Americans who listen to any kind of online audio, and the portion who listen to podcasts, have both reached new record highs …
Eric Benjamin Seufert / Mobile Dev Memo:
EU's hostility towards Meta's “Pay or Okay” model is misguided as the model does not force users to use Meta's platforms and it has been deemed GDPR compliant  —  On Monday, the European Commission announced that it is launching investigations into Alphabet, Apple, and Meta under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Sources: Amazon's AGI team is aiming to outperform Anthropic's latest Claude models by the middle of 2024 using the company's forthcoming LLM, codenamed Olympus  —  This week, Amazon completed the second phase of a deal announced last September, when it committed to investing up to $4 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic.
Knowing Machines:
Inside LAION-5B, an AI training dataset of 5B+ images that has been unavailable for download after researchers found 3,000+ instances of CSAM in December 2023  —  If you want to make a really big AI model — the kind that can generate images or do your homework, or build this website …

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More News

Ben Cohen / Wall Street Journal:
Ellen Huet / Bloomberg:
Candice L. Odgers / Nature:
Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal:
Frank Landymore / Futurism:
Colin Lecher / The City:

Earlier Picks

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Axios:
Darius Rafieyan / Business Insider:
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: