Techmeme
July 27, 2023, 2:50 PM

Top News

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
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Google rolls out Android unknown tracker alerts, including manual scan, and pauses a Find My Device update to locate missing items until Apple updates iOS  —  Google today will begin to roll out a new safety feature, unknown tracker alerts, first announced at its developer event Google I/O this spring.
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.
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.’
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:
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” …
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 …
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’
@esthercrawford:
Aisyah Llewellyn / Al Jazeera:
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.
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
Meta Investor Relations:
Scott Nover / Quartz:
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.
Carly Page / TechCrunch:
Filing: US government services contractor Maximus says MOVEit hackers accessed protected health information and other data of “at least” 8M to 11M people  —  U.S. government services contracting giant Maximus has confirmed that hackers exploiting a vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer accessed …
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:
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
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.

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More News

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:

Earlier Picks

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