Techmeme
August 1, 2024, 7:40 AM

Top News

Meta:
Meta reports Q2 revenue up 22% YoY to $39.07B, net income up 73% to $13.47B, and family daily active people up 7% to 3.27B on average for June 2024  —  Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META) today reported financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2024.
Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity need to pay to scrape Reddit's data, and blocking them has been “a real pain in the ass”  —  After striking deals with Google and OpenAI, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is calling on Microsoft and others to pay if they want to continue scraping the site's data.
CNBC:
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian says the CrowdStrike-caused outage will cost the company $500M, after canceling 6,000+ flights, and Delta will seek damages  —  WATCH NOW  —  Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said Wednesday that the massive IT outage earlier this month that stranded thousands of customers will cost it $500 million.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Discord on Xbox adds the ability to watch friends' Discord streams whether they're sharing from a PC, mobile phone, or Xbox, rolling out over the coming weeks  —  Microsoft and Discord are greatly improving the integration of the communication platform into Xbox consoles.
Wesley Yin-Poole / IGN:
Bungie says it will lay off 220 employees, or 17% of its workforce, and integrate an additional 155 roles into its parent company Sony Interactive Entertainment  —  “Today is a difficult and painful day.”  —  Destiny developer Bungie has today announced significant cuts at the studio …
Ian King / Bloomberg:
Qualcomm reports Q3 revenue up 11% YoY to $9.39B, vs. $9.21B est., handset chip sales up 12% YoY to $5.9B, and forecasts Q4 revenue above estimates  —  - Company says phone units will be ‘flattish’ this year  — Upbeat revenue forecast had buoyed stock after earnings report
Jonathan Kemper / The Decoder:
Google unveils updates to its Gemma family of open models, including Gemma 2 2B, which it claims surpasses GPT-3.5 and Mixtral 8x7B on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena  —  Google has unveiled updates to its Gemma 2 family of open-source language models, focusing on improved performance, safety, and transparency.
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Microsoft says that a nine-hour outage on July 30, which disrupted multiple Microsoft 365 and Azure services worldwide, was triggered by a DDoS attack  —  Microsoft confirmed today that a nine-hour outage on Tuesday that took down and disrupted multiple Microsoft 365 and Azure services worldwide …
Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk:
Tether reports a “record” $5.2B net profit in H1 2024, net operating profit of $1.3B in Q2, and $97.6B US debt holdings, more than Germany and other countries  —  The company said its $97 billion exposure to U.S. Treasuries would put it 18th in the ranking among countries.
Sean Lyngaas / CNN:
A ransomware attack hits blood donation nonprofit OneBlood, which has asked over 250 hospitals in the US to activate their critical blood shortage protocols  —  A cyberattack has hit a blood-donation nonprofit that serves hundreds of hospitals in the southeastern US.
Anna Washenko / Engadget:
US senators unveil the bipartisan NO FAKES Act, which would make individuals and companies liable for producing, hosting, or sharing unauthorized AI deepfakes  —  OpenAI joined several entertainment industry groups in backing the NO FAKES Act.  —  Today, a group of senators introduced the NO FAKES Act …
Bloomberg:
Investigation: 2020 to 2023 data shows how thousands of middlemen game the H-1B program and companies that farm out IT workers exploit the US lottery system  —  Each year in April, the US government conducts a lottery that shapes the lives of hundreds of thousands of people — and America's future as an economic power.
Tales Azzoni / Associated Press:
The Premier League, Bundesliga, DAZN, Sky, UEFA, CONMEBOL, and others write to X CEO Linda Yaccarino demanding more action against illegal soccer content on X  —  Some of Europe's main broadcasters and top soccer leagues have sent a letter to the CEO of social media platform X, Linda Yaccarino …
Bloomberg:
A look at Baidu's experiment with driverless taxis in Wuhan, which became China's biggest proving ground for Baidu's taxis due to a relaxed regulatory approach  —  Wuhan's experiment with driverless taxis could help China lead the world on the emerging technology.  It also risks putting thousands of people out of work.
Allison Johnson / The Verge:
Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.1 beta hands-on: meaningful Siri language understanding improvements and Siri text input is nice, but few other notable features  —  In iOS 18's latest developer preview, Siri gets a glow-up.  Like, the whole phone actually glows around the edges when you invoke Siri.

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Cloudflare:
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Zoho:
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CNBC:
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Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: