Techmeme
February 29, 2024, 10:45 PM

Top News

Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
Source: Embracer plans to sell its subsidiary Saber Interactive to private investors in a $500M deal, making Saber a privately-owned company with ~3,500 staff  —  Saber will continue developing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic  —  Swedish gaming company Embracer Group AB will sell …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Microsoft launches Copilot for Finance in public preview, helping users reconcile data in Excel, speed up the collections process in Outlook, and more  —  - Microsoft is launching a Copilot for Finance, which it said will be able to perform a handful of common role-specific actions in Excel and Outlook.
Consumer Reports:
Researchers find serious security flaws in cheap video doorbells sold by Chinese company Aiwit under various brand names on Amazon, Shein, Temu, and other sites  —  The devices are also sold by Walmart, Sears, and other retailers—and big platforms have faced few consequences for shipping flawed products
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Alibaba researchers detail EMO, or Emote Portrait Alive, an AI system that creates a realistic talking or singing video from a portrait photo and an audio file  —  Researchers at Alibaba's Institute for Intelligent Computing have developed a new artificial intelligence system called “EMO,” …
Ashley Capoot / CNBC:
Change Healthcare confirms that the ransomware group BlackCat is behind the ongoing attack that has caused widespread disruptions to pharmacies across the US  —  - Change Healthcare on Thursday confirmed that the ransomware group Blackcat is behind the ongoing cybersecurity attack that's been impacting its systems since last week.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
Microsoft outlines its new DirectSR API, which lets game developers integrate super resolution AI-upscaling features from Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and others  —  Microsoft has outlined a new Windows API designed to offer a seamless way for game developers to integrate super resolution AI-upscaling features from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel.
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
JFrog finds ~100 malicious PyTorch and Tensorflow Keras models on Hugging Face, some of which can execute code on users' machines to give attackers a backdoor  —  At least 100 instances of malicious AI ML models were found on the Hugging Face platform, some of which can execute code on the victim's machine …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Brave debuts its AI-powered assistant Leo, which can create real-time summaries of webpages or videos, generate long-form written content, and more, on Android  —  Brave is launching its AI-powered assistant, Leo, to all Android users.  The assistant allows users to ask questions …
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google adds Photomath, which solves math problems after users take photos, to its Play Store and App Store publisher accounts, after buying the app in May 2022  —  In May of 2022, Google announced that it was acquiring a math solver app called Photomath.  The deal closed last year …
Stephanie Kirchgaessner / The Guardian:
A US judge orders the NSO Group to hand over its code for Pegasus and other spyware products to WhatsApp, as part of the company's ongoing litigation  —  Israeli company NSO Group is accused in lawsuit by Meta's messaging app of spying on 1,400 users over a two-week period
Bloomberg:
Meta plans to deprecate the Facebook News tab in the US and Australia in early April 2024 and stop signing deals for traditional news content in those countries  —  Meta Platforms Inc. is winding down its news feature in the US and Australia, part of a broader shift away from the category for the social media giant.
Larry Dignan / Constellation Research:
Dell reports Q4 revenue down 11% YoY to $22.3B, vs. $22.2B est., Client revenue down 12% to $11.7B, and Infrastructure revenue down 6% to $9.3B; DELL jumps 15%+  —  Dell Technologies reported a better-than-expected fourth quarter as the company saw strong demand for AI-optimized servers.
Greg Bensinger / Reuters:
Email: GM told Cruise employees that the company's internal share price had been estimated at $11.80 by a third party, down from $24.27 just one quarter ago  —  General Motors' (GM.N) Cruise saw its internal share price cut by more than half from a quarter ago as the fallout …
Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
HPE reports Q1 revenue down 14% YoY to $6.76B, vs. $7.1B est., Server revenue down 23% YoY to $3.4B, and reduces its FY 2024 outlook for sales growth and profit  —  Revenue will increase as much as 2%, excluding currency fluctuations, in the fiscal year ending in October.
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Robotics startup Figure AI confirms raising $675M at a $2.6B valuation and is partnering with OpenAI to “develop next-generation AI models for humanoid robots”  —  - Figure AI raised $675 million from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft and OpenAI.
Davey Winder / Forbes:
Russian-speaking LockBit threatens to release Fulton County Court's Donald Trump case docs “that could affect the upcoming US election”, if a ransom isn't paid  —  The LockBit ransomware group is threatening to release Fulton County Court documents related to Donald Trump's case unless …
Jeanne Whalen / Washington Post:
The US launches a probe into possible security risks of Chinese-manufactured vehicles, saying modern cars are like smartphones and could be used for espionage  —  The Biden administration says software and digital connections in modern cars could be used to spy on Americans or sabotage the vehicles
Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: the SEC is investigating whether OpenAI investors were misled, after the board claimed during Sam Altman's firing that he wasn't “consistently candid”  —  Regulator is examining internal communications of CEO Sam Altman, after board last year temporarily ousted him for alleged lack of candor

Sponsor Posts

Google:
Generate videos with Veo 3 in Google Gemini  —  Create high-quality, 8-second videos with Veo 3, our state-of-the-art AI video generator.  Try it with a Google AI Pro plan or get the highest access with the Ultra plan.
Codegen:
Ship with AI: The Future of Coding is Here  —  Use natural language in Slack to trigger real PRs, docs, dashboards, infra & more.  Codegen connects GitHub, Linear, Notion, and beyond.
Zoho:
Introducing Zia Hubs: An intelligent tool to extract information from raw enterprise data  —  The world is constantly evolving, and businesses are now continually generating vast amounts of data at multiple levels of the enterprise every day.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Techmeme Ride Home:
Grok: Let Me See What Elon Thinks
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe to Techmeme Ride Home.
Hard Fork:
Interesting Times: A Mind-Bending Conversation with Peter Thiel
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
Spotlight On:
VBSR 1.03: Scale, Circle, and Exits 101
A podcast from Accel about how companies are built, from the people doing the building.
Subscribe to Spotlight On.
BG2 Pod:
Michael Dell - Invest America Act Becomes Law, AI Talent Wars, Compute Demand, Market Update
Open-source podcast on all things tech, markets, investing, and capitalism, hosted by Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley.
Subscribe to BG2 Pod.
Great Chat:
When startups become theatre
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 10:45 PM ET, February 29, 2024.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Paul Vieira / Wall Street Journal:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

Earlier Picks

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Reuters:
Leo Schwartz / Fortune:
Alex Koller / CNBC: