Q&A with Substack CEO Chris Best about Notes, asking for investment without sharing financial details, and more, as he evades some content moderation questions  —  Can Substack handle the wrath of Elon Musk and the pain of content moderation?  —  It is fair to say that Substack …

Twitter adds support for tweets up to 10,000 characters in length, with italic and bold text formatting, for Blue subscribers  —  We're making improvements to the writing and reading experience on Twitter! Starting today, Twitter now supports Tweets up to 10,000 characters in length, with bold and italic text formatting. Sign up for Twitter Blue to access these new features, and apply to enable... https://twitter.com/...

One of the Western Digital hackers claims they stole ~10TB of data, including customer information, and says they are asking for a ransom of “minimum 8 figures”  —  One of the hackers claimed to have stolen customer data and said they are asking for a “minim 8 figures” as a ramsom.

WhatsApp rolls out a handful of new verification and protection features, including defenses against SIM jacking and social engineering attacks  —  WhatsApp has begun rolling out a handful of new security features.  The most notable sees the company doing more to protect users against SIM jacking …

Hacker advocacy group Hacking Policy Council launches to support security researchers' work; founding members include HackerOne, Bugcrowd, Google, and Intel  —  “There are advocacy groups for reptile owners but not hackers, so that seems like a miss,” said Ilona Cohen of HackerOne.

Sensor Tower: Twitter's top 50 advertisers spent a combined $83M over the past two months, down from $102M YoY; Mars, AT&T, and Volkswagen haven't returned  —  Twitter-owner Elon Musk has said advertisers are returning to the social media platform, but statements from several companies …

Meta open sources Animated Drawings, an AI project that turns doodles into animations, with a dataset of nearly 180K drawings  —  Meta has open-sourced an artificial intelligence project that lets anyone bring their doodles to life.  The company hopes that by offering Animated Drawings …

Denver-based Elevate, which provides a dashboard for managing employee benefits, raised $28M led by Anthemis, bringing its total funding to $43M  —  Elevate, a consumer benefits administration platform, today announced that it raised $28 million in a funding round led by Anthemis with participation …

BeReal struggles to retain users as some find its authenticity monotonous; Apptopia: the app's daily users dropped to under 6M in March from ~15M in October  —  BeReal was pitched as Gen Z's safe haven from the artifice of social media.  For some, authenticity only proved interesting for so long.

Parlement Technologies agrees to sell right-wing social network Parler to Starboard, which will take temporarily shut down Parler ahead of a planned relaunch  —  Social network popular with conservatives will be sold for an undisclosed amount and overhauled for a relaunch

Intel faces huge challenges in revitalizing its business, meaning a central piece of US industrial policy rests on one of the most complex tech turnarounds ever  —  Once the leading player in the semiconductor industry, the company is attempting to pull off one of tech's most complex turnrounds

Spotify brings its “broadcast-to-podcast” tech, which it acquired from Whooshkaa in 2021, to Megaphone, letting publishers convert radio shows into podcasts  —  Fox Corp. is one partner using the audio giant's “broadcast-to-podcast” technology to turn existing Fox radio shows into on-demand podcasts.

Filing: Amazon paid Andy Jassy $1.3M in 2022 after he got a $200M+ stock grant in 2021; in his first annual letter, Jassy talks efficiency, ads, LLMs, and more  —  Jassy had earned $212 million in 2021.  —  Amazon CEO Andy Jassy saw his 2022 compensation crater in 2022 …