Techmeme
July 3, 2024, 9:50 PM

Top News

Alex Heath / The Verge:
Mark Zuckerberg says Threads has 175M+ MAUs, up from 150M in April, ahead of its one-year anniversary on July 5; source: Meta may turn on ads in Threads in 2025  —  A year and a half ago, Threads was but a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg's eye.  —  Now, the rival to Elon Musk's X has reached …
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Q&A with Adam Mosseri on Threads' first year, not leaning into political content, driving engagement, focusing on real-time content, the fediverse, and more  —  A year ago this week, Meta introduced Threads to the world.  —  The text-based social network, which launched as a kind …
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
Twilio says threat actors identified the phone numbers of users of its 2FA app Authy; last week, hackers claimed to have stolen 33M phone numbers from Twilio  —  Last week, a hacker claimed to have stolen 33 million phone numbers from U.S. messaging giant Twilio.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Amazon plans to discontinue Astro for Business, its robot security guard for SMBs announced in November 2023, on September 25 to focus on its Astro home robot  —  Astro is leaving its job to spend more time with family.  —  Amazon informed customers and employees Wednesday morning that it plans …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
OpenAI updates its ChatGPT macOS app to encrypt locally stored conversations, after a user discovered that the app was storing chats in plain text  —  Until Friday, OpenAI's recently launched ChatGPT macOS app had a potentially worrying security issue: it wasn't hard to find your chats stored …
Andrea Hsu / NPR:
A federal court in Texas temporarily blocks the US government's ban on noncompete agreements that was set to take effect September 4  —  A federal court in Texas has partially blocked the government's ban on noncompete agreements that was set to take effect September 4.
Rocky Swift / Reuters:
Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, after scrapping over 1,000 regulations governing their use  —  Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday, reaching a long-awaited milestone …
Juby Babu / Reuters:
Information management company OpenText plans to cut about 1,200 jobs, or ~1.7% of its workforce, and expects to reduce its annual expenses by CA$150M in 2025  —  OpenText Corp (OTEX.TO) said on Wednesday it would cut about 1,200 jobs, around 1.7% of its workforce, as part of its new business optimization plan.
Associated Press:
Microsoft agrees to pay $14.4M to settle with the California Civil Rights Department over allegations it discriminated against workers who took protected leave  —  Microsoft Corp. has agreed to pay $14.4 million to settle allegations that the global software giant retaliated and discriminated …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Noplace, a Gen Z-focused social media app backed by Alexis Ohanian's 776 and others, tops the US iOS App Store; it raised a $15M Series A1 at a $75M valuation  —  Aiming to bring the “social” back to “social media,” a new app called noplace has surged to the top of the App Store as it launched out of invite-only mode Wednesday.
Amy Thomson / Bloomberg:
UK-listed Keywords Studios, which provides game development, audio, and art services to Epic and others, agrees to private equity firm EQT's ~£2.1B takeover bid  —  - Investors get £24.50 per share in cash in private equity deal  — Keywords works for titles including Fortnite, Call of Duty
Emma Farge / Reuters:
WIPO: between 2014 and 2023, 54K generative AI patents were filed, 25% of which were filed in 2023; China leads with 38K+ patents, followed by the US with 6,276  —  China is far ahead of other countries in generative AI inventions like chatbots, filing six times more patents than its closest rival …
Julia Love / Bloomberg:
Alphabet winds down agriculture startup Mineral, which became an independent subsidiary in 2023, and licenses some of its tech to berry producer Driscoll's  —  The company no longer has a place for all of its moonshot startups  —  Alphabet Inc. is licensing some technology …

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