Techmeme
July 27, 2023, 12:30 PM

Top News

New York Times:
Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren announce the Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act, seeking an independent regulator to license and police Big Tech  —  Mr. Graham, a Republican, is the senior senator from South Carolina.  Ms. Warren, a Democrat, is the senior senator from Massachusetts.
Makena Kelly / The Verge:
The US Senate Judiciary Committee advances the Kids Online Safety Act and COPPA 2.0; critics highlight issues, like forcing companies to collect more user data  —  Congress is closer than ever to passing a pair of bills to childproof the internet after lawmakers voted to send them to the floor Thursday.
The Verge:
Sony has sold over 40M PS5s since its launch in November 2020, up from 10M in July 2021, despite the “unprecedented challenges of COVID” and supply chain issues  —  / Despite supply chain issues and the problems caused by the pandemic, Sony says the PS5 supply is now ‘well-stocked.’
Kim Mackrael / Wall Street Journal:
The EU opens an antitrust investigation into whether Microsoft abuses its dominant position by bundling Teams with Office, the first investigation in 10+ years  —  Probe marks the first time in a decade that Microsoft has come under formal investigation by Brussels
Steve Moser / MacRumors:
iOS 17 beta 4 code hints at a rumored Action button, offering quick access to Shortcuts, Silent Mode, Camera, and more, similar to the Watch Ultra's button  —  Apple released the fourth beta of iOS 17 to developers yesterday, and among the changes in the latest beta are some new code snippets …
@esthercrawford:
Ex-Twitter Director of Product Management Esther Crawford on the “culture of fear”, Elon Musk's strengths and weaknesses, the sleeping bag incident, and more  —  Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company. I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in... [video]
Financial Times:
Sources: Linda Yaccarino pitched her vision for Twitter/X to talent agencies in LA and met with Disney, in a bid to bring stars and influencers to the platform  —  Social media app's new chief meets with agents at leading talent agencies amid controversy over rebranding to ‘X’
Aisyah Llewellyn / Al Jazeera:
Reuters:
Source: about 10 years ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard to overstate battery range; in 2022, Tesla created a “Diversion Team” to suppress thousands of complaints  —  About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide “rosy” …
Bloomberg:
Meta forecasts 20% revenue growth in Q3, returning to pre-pandemic and pre-ATT levels, potentially creating cover for expensive AI and metaverse investments  —  - Meta's current quarter sales projection beats estimates  — Company continues to increase spending on metaverse, AI
Scott Nover / Quartz:
Meta Investor Relations:
Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
Jon Porter / The Verge:
WhatsApp announces instant video messages, letting users send clips up to 60 seconds in a similar way to voice notes; videos automatically play on mute  —  WhatApp's latest feature is the ability to quickly send short video messages, similar to the voice messages the service already supports.
Cade Metz / New York Times:
Researchers: the guardrails on ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude can be bypassed by adding a long suffix of characters to prompts, generating false and toxic responses  —  A new report indicates that the guardrails for widely used chatbots can be thwarted, leading to an increasingly unpredictable environment for the technology.
David Pierce / The Verge:
A postmortem of Neeva, which tried to build a faster, simpler, and ad-free search engine, and how default search engine choices reinforce Google's dominance  —  A couple of ex-Googlers set out to create the search engine of the future.  They built something faster, simpler, and ad-free.
Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to.  Twitter: @lutherlowe.  Threads: @imdavidpierce and @parkerortolani
Forums: r/technology and Beehaw
Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
The US DOJ informed a federal judge that Sam Bankman-Fried won't face the campaign finance charge, which wasn't part of an extradition document with The Bahamas  —  The Justice Department said late Wednesday that the campaign finance charge was not included in an extradition document with The Bahamas …
CNN:
Sheila Chiang / CNBC:
Samsung reports Q2 revenue down 22% YoY to ~$47.21B, below analyst expectations of ~$47.7B, and operating profit down 95% YoY to ~$525M due to weak phone demand  —  - Samsung is the world's largest maker of dynamic random-access memory chips, which are found in consumer devices such as smartphones and computers.
Washington Post:
How Russia's invasion led Ukraine to innovate in combat drones, including improving speed, flight range, and payload, and the implications for warfare globally  —  The advent of AI-enabled drones holds huge promise for Ukraine's military but may also be exploited by nefarious non-state actors
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Israeli startup Trustmi, which offers payments fraud prevention tools, raised a $17M Series A led by Cyberstarts, taking its total funding to $21M  —  Shai Gabay and Eli Ben-Nun, two entrepreneurs based in Israel, met in 2018 while working at Cynet, a cybersecurity startup developing extended detection and response tools.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Adobe adds Firefly-based Generative Expand, which “expands images beyond their original bounds”, to the Photoshop beta and support for prompts in 100 languages  —  Adobe is building on Firefly, its family of generative AI models, with a feature in Photoshop that …

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Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
Bloomberg:
Tom Warren / The Verge: