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August 8, 2023, 11:00 AM
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Top News

Rowena Mason / The Guardian:
The UK Electoral Commission reports a hack by “hostile actors” starting in August 2021 and identified in October 2022; the full scope isn't “conclusively” known  —  Watchdog apologises for security breach in which names and addresses were accessible as far back as 2021
Jane Friedman:
An author finds multiple “garbage books” uploaded to Amazon under her name, most likely AI-generated, and on Goodreads, which removed them after her complaint  —  Update: Hours after this post was published, my Goodreads profile was cleaned of the offending titles.
Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch:
Prosecraft, a site that compiled 27K+ books to compare and rank the “vividness” of their language, shuts down after writers' backlash over its possible AI uses
Casey Newton / Platformer:
After the countless times Elon Musk has walked back announcements, the business media must rethink its coverage of X, Musk, and the fight with Mark Zuckerberg  —  After a weekend of whoppers about X and fighting Mark Zuckerberg, the press should take a more skeptical approach
Nikkei Asia:
Source: Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, and Intel plan to invest in Arm's US IPO as soon as shares are listed in September; SoftBank owns 75% of Arm and Vision Fund 25%  —  SoftBank chip design unit to debut on Nasdaq, market cap seen topping $60bn  —  SoftBank Group plans to list shares in its chip deign unit …
Bloomberg:
SoftBank reports ~$426M profit for Vision Fund in Q1, up from a ~$16.4B loss in Q1 2022 and ~$30B in FY2022; Vision Fund invested $1.6B in Q1; Arm lost ~$66.4M
Bloomberg:
TSMC agrees to build a €10B plant in Germany's Dresden, owning 70% of the facility with Infineon, NXP, and Bosch each holding 10% stake, set to open in 2027  —  - Taiwanese giant will own 70% of fab in eastern city of Dresden  — Facility to supply auto, industrial sectors starting in 2027
Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
Researchers tested 14 LLMs for political bias and found OpenAI's GPT-4 was the most left-wing libertarian and Meta's LLaMA was the most right-wing authoritarian  —  New research explains you'll get more right- or left-wing answers, depending on which AI model you ask.  —  Should companies have social responsibilities?
Kristi Hines / Search Engine Journal:
OpenAI details GPTBot, which the company uses to crawl the web for data to improve its AI models, and how site admins can opt out using robots.txt
Richard Lawler / The Verge:
A US judge denies Google a summary judgment in a $5B lawsuit over the company tracking users' activities in Incognito mode, pushing the case closer to a trial  —  / Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers denied Google's push for a summary judgment in a lawsuit over the way it tracked internet activity …
Hayden Field / CNBC:
Zoom updates its terms to let the company train its AI models using some customer data, but doesn't plan to use audio, video, or chat content without consent  —  - Zoom's terms of service update establishes the video platform's right to use some customer data for training its AI models.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Developer logs: Apple is testing M3 Max with a 16-core CPU, a 40-core GPU, and 48GB of RAM, in a new MacBook Pro that Apple is expected to launch in 2024  —  - The chip has 16 central processing cores and 40 for graphics  — Company is testing flurry of new Macs as it seeks sales boost
Steven Levy / Wired:
Q&A with Grimes on her “c” persona, letting people use her voice in their music, AI, social media, Elon Musk, NFTs, a stronger sense of ethics in tech, and more  —  Claire Boucher is open sourcing her musical persona to let people create their own version of Grimes with AI.
Jpatokal / Gyrovague:
A look at archive.today, an opaque service to access paywalled content that hosts 1,000TB and uses a Russian analytics engine and Europe-based data centers  —  Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can't afford to pay …
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge:
Matter's biggest problem is that companies can't agree on how to support Thread, a protocol Matter picked, especially for border routers joining mesh networks  —  The Thread protocol offers a robust mesh network designed to solve many of the smart home's biggest problems.
Rita Liao / TechCrunch:
China releases draft rules for limiting the use of facial recognition to “specific purposes and full necessity”, requiring individual approval, and more  —  The pervasive use of facial recognition technology across all facets of life in China has elicited both praise for its convenience and backlash around privacy concerns.

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:00 AM ET, August 8, 2023.

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From Mediagazer

Nancy Scola / Washingtonian:
A deep look at FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's moves favoring the Trump administration; former chair Tom Wheeler warns against the agency becoming a political tool

Lucia Moses / Business Insider:
WaPo opinion editor Adam O'Neal says he's stepping down after a year in the role; his hiring was part of a push to promote “personal liberties and free markets”

Matt Stout / The Boston Globe:
The Massachusetts Senate passes an amendment that would in many instances bar judges, grand juries, and others from forcing reporters to identify their sources

More News

Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:
Sources: in late 2020, the NSA discovered that Chinese hackers had access to Japanese defense networks; the problem persisted until at least fall 2021

Earlier Picks

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
The European Commission opens a full-scale investigation into Adobe's $20B Figma acquisition, after a preliminary review found the deal may reduce competition
Emma Goldberg / New York Times:
Zoom, known for helping millions of people work from home, asks its employees living within 50 miles of an office to work in person at least two days per week
Niket Nishant / Reuters:
Neuralink, the brain-computer interface startup Elon Musk co-founded, raised a $280M Series D led by Founders Fund, after a reported ~$5B valuation in June 2023
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Microsoft says Bing Chat, which is only available in products like its Edge browser and Bing app, is coming “soon” to third-party browsers, including on mobile
Anna Irrera / Bloomberg:
PayPal debuts PYUSD, a Paxos-issued stablecoin and fully backed by USD deposits, short-term Treasuries, and cash equivalents, rolling out to US users gradually
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