Techmeme
June 27, 2023, 5:40 PM

Top News

Chris Vallance / BBC:
Apple says the UK should amend its Online Safety Bill, which would mandate scanning messages for CSAM, to protect encryption, joining WhatsApp and Signal  —  Apple has criticised powers in the Online Safety Bill that could be used to force encrypted messaging tools like iMessage …
Wall Street Journal:
How Silicon Valley executives' routine drug use moved from an after-hours activity squarely into corporate culture, causing issues for boards and tech leaders  —  Entrepreneurs including Elon Musk and Sergey Brin are part of a drug movement that proponents hope will expand minds, enhance lives and produce business breakthroughs
Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:
A Pixel Fold reviewer says the device's flexible OLED screen died after four days of light use, starting at the bottom and moving up, likely from crushed debris  —  The closed display halves almost touch, and that can smash debris into the screen.  —  A flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Monica Chin / The Verge:
The Mac Pro with M2 Ultra, which lacks support for external GPUs and is capped to 192GB of RAM, is a tough sell for pros, given the cheaper M2 Ultra Mac Studio  —  Apple's latest Mac Pro targets professionals with highly demanding computing workloads.  But we talked to those professionals …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
FTC v. Microsoft: an internal Microsoft presentation from June 2022 discussed building on Windows 365 “to enable full Windows ... streamed from the cloud”  —  Microsoft has been increasingly moving Windows to the cloud on the commercial side with Windows 365, but the software giant also wants to do the same for consumers.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Meta launches new parental controls and other safety features for Messenger and Instagram in the US, the UK, and Canada, including letting parents view contacts  —  Meta announced new parental control tools across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger today.  This includes a new parental supervision hub …
Mike Corder / Associated Press:
French and Dutch police say the 115M+ communications obtained by cracking the encryption of EncroChat phones, announced in 2020, has led to 6,558 arrests so far  —  Investigations triggered by the cracking of encrypted phones three years ago have so far led to more than 6,500 arrests worldwide …
Jonathan Randles / Bloomberg:
Source: 3AC liquidators are seeking to recover $1.3B from co-founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, taking action against the duo in a British Virgin Islands court  —  Three Arrows Capital liquidators are seeking to recover $1.3 billion from the co-founders of the failed crypto hedge fund …
Ben Lovejoy / 9to5Mac:
Apple Vision Pro documentation: the device has a “system boundary”, defined as a 1.5-meter radius from the headset, when in a “fully immersive VR experience”  —  Apple has limited a Vision Pro safe area to 10 feet by 10 feet, when using fully immersive VR experiences.
Meir Orbach / CTech:
Tel Aviv-based enterprise data security startup Cyera raised a $100M Series B led by Accel, a source says at a $500M valuation; Sequoia and others participated  —  The Israeli company's data security platform learns an enterprise's unique data and business purpose using large language models …
Zheping Huang / Bloomberg:
Baidu claims that its latest LLM, Ernie 3.5, surpasses GPT-3.5-based ChatGPT in general abilities and outperforms GPT-4 in many Chinese-language capabilities  —  Baidu Inc.'s ChatGPT-style service has outperformed OpenAI's seminal product on several measures, China's search leader said on Tuesday.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
TikTok plans to shut down TikTok Now, its BeReal clone unveiled in September 2022, without giving a reason; user estimates suggest that BeReal has faded in 2023  —  TikTok is killing off its BeReal clone TikTok Now, according to notifications being sent to users.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
A 2019 email by Xbox Game Studios' Matt Booty encouraged acquiring games to “spend Sony out of business”; Microsoft says the company didn't pursue the strategy  —  Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios chief, Matt Booty, was encouraging Xbox CFO Tim Stuart to spend big money …
Steve Lohr / New York Times:
Some doctors say that their current best use for generative AI is to ease the heavy burden of documentation, which takes hours a day and contributes to burnout  —  The best use for generative A.I. in health care, doctors say, is to ease the heavy burden of documentation that takes them hours a day and contributes to burnout.
Jane Lee / Reuters:
Snowflake partners with Nvidia to let customers build generative AI models using their own data; Nvidia plans to embed NeMo Framework into Snowflake Data Cloud  —  Snowflake (SNOW.N) a cloud data analytics company, is partnering with computing company Nvidia (NVDA.O) to allow customers ranging …
Aaron Holmes / The Information:
More: The Decoder and Fast Company
Bluesky: @iamnow.bsky.socialTwitter: @aaronpholmes, @toughsf, @fromvalue, and @amirForums: Slashdot
New York Times:
A look at review-bombing campaigns on Goodreads that can derail a book's publication long before its release, frustrating both new and established authors  —  The website Goodreads has become an essential avenue for building readership, but the same features that help generate excitement can also backfire.

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Earlier Picks

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Robert D. McFadden / New York Times: