Techmeme
April 4, 2024, 3:05 AM

Top News

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple is exploring home robotic devices, including a mobile robot that can follow users and a table-top device that uses robotics to move a display  —  - The company has teams working on automated home devices  — The search is on for new growth sources after EV gets nixed
Financial Times:
The Guardian:
Sources: Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza used Lavender, an AI system that identified 37,000 potential human targets based on their apparent links to Hamas  —  Israeli intelligence sources reveal use of ‘Lavender’ system in Gaza war and claim permission given to kill civilians in pursuit of low-ranking militants
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Memo: AWS plans to cut several hundred jobs in its Sales, Marketing, and Global Services organization, and a few hundred in its Physical Stores Technology team  —  Amazon Web Services will cut several hundred jobs in its Sales, Marketing, and Global Services organization …
Amrita Khalid / The Verge:
X adds blue checks to some large accounts as part of its plan to give free Premium memberships to those with at least 2,500 “verified subscriber followers”  —  Just as Elon Musk said, X is doling out free Premium and Premium memberships to accounts with a high number of verified followers.
Joyce Lee / Reuters:
SK Hynix says it will invest ~$3.87B in an advanced packaging plant and R&D facility in Indiana to mass-produce high bandwidth memory chips starting in H2 2028  —  SK Hynix (000660.KS), the world's second-largest memory chip maker, said on Wednesday it will invest around $3.87 billion …
Ina Fried / Axios:
OpenAI says that paid users can now edit DALL-E images in ChatGPT across web, iOS, and Android, using a selection tool and additional text prompts  —  - DALL-E will also begin letting people choose the aspect ratio of the desired image as well as to add styles, such as “motion blur” or “solarpunk.”
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
An interview with Andres Freund, a Microsoft database engineer working on PostgreSQL, on discovering the XZ Utils backdoor, doubting his own findings, and more  —  The internet, as anyone who works deep in its trenches will tell you, is not a smooth, well-oiled machine.
Threads: @jenvalentino_nytX: @kevinrooseLinkedIn: Affan DarForums: Hacker News, r/technology, and r/neoliberal
Wired:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Windows 10 security updates will cost $61/device for year one, doubling for year two and doubling again for year three, after ending support on October 14, 2025  —  Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 on October 14th, 2025, and you'll need to pay yearly if you want to continue using the operating system securely.
Richard Lawler / The Verge:
Apple resolves an outage impacting some of its online services, including the App Store, Apple TV, Podcasts, and Music, that lasted for over an hour on April 3  —  Apple's online services were hit with an outage that cut many of us off from the App Store, Apple TV, and Apple Music on Wednesday night.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Spotify plans to raise prices by $1 to $2 per month in the UK, Australia, Pakistan, and two other markets by the end of April, and the US later in 2024  —  - The audio service will raise prices in a few major markets  — Spotify will create new plan that doesn't include audiobooks
TechCrunch:
A look at some exciting startups from day one of YC's Winter 2024 Demo Day, including those using AI for creating music and helping lawyers review documents  —  Springtime means rain, the return of flowers and, of course, Y Combinator's first demo day of the year.
Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch:
Self-driving software startup Ghost Autonomy, formerly Ghost Locomotion, shuts down, after raising ~$220M and just five months after partnering with OpenAI  —  Ghost Autonomy, a startup working on autonomous driving software for automaker partners, has shut down, TechCrunch has learned.
Business Insider:
Meta is testing giving cash bonuses to creators who post engaging content on Threads, as part of an invite-only program  —  - Meta is testing cash bonuses for creators who post engaging content on Threads.  — Threads is currently the top app in Apple's App Store, and had 130 million active users in February.

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More News

Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Amrita Khalid / The Verge:

Earlier Picks

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Emilia David / The Verge:
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Michael Kan / PCMag: