Techmeme
October 17, 2024, 1:00 PM

Top News

Financial Times:
Sources: last week, Meta fired ~24 staff in LA for using $25 meal credits to buy household items, as it restructures WhatsApp, Instagram, and Reality Labs teams  —  The terminations took place last week, just days before the $1.5tn social media company separately began restructuring certain …
Bloomberg:
Sources: the EU warns X that it may calculate fines against X by including Elon Musk's other companies' revenue; the DSA can fine 6% of global annual revenue  —  - Commission may base fine on revenue from Musk's ventures  — Investigators haven't come to a conclusion about fining X
Sarah Wynn / The Block:
The FBI charges Alabama man Eric Council Jr. with hacking the SEC's X account on January 9, 2024 to post a fake announcement about approving spot bitcoin ETFs  —  - Eric Council Jr., 25, was charged with “conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud.”
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
On Apple Pay's 10th anniversary, Apple adds support for Klarna in the US and UK and plans to expand installment loan options and add reward redemptions  —  On Thursday, Apple celebrated 10 years with Apple Pay and announced how the service will evolve in the future, including features …
Kevin Purdy / Ars Technica:
Winamp owner Llama Group deletes the GitHub repository of the legacy player's source code posted on September 24, following criticism on the way it was released  —  Winamp, through its Belgian owner Llama Group, posted the source for its “Legacy Player Code” on September 24 so that developers could …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
On a podcast, Donald Trump says Tim Cook called him “hours ago” to complain about EU fines and that Cook said the EU uses fines “to run their enterprise”  —  Donald Trump said Apple CEO Tim Cook called him to discuss the billions of dollars that Apple has been fined in the European Union.
Virginia Heffernan / Wired:
Q&A with Marissa Mayer on AI, her startup Sunshine, its Shine app, Google News, Yahoo, selling to Verizon, Yahoo Weather, feminism, being a geek, and more  —  She was the 20th hire at Google, then the head of Yahoo, and now the CEO of Sunshine.  For Mayer, geekery supersedes gender.
Forums: Hacker News
Jane Lanhee Lee / Bloomberg:
Jessie Yeung / CNN:
Hong Kong police arrested 24+ members of an alleged pig butchering crime ring, which they say used deepfake AI to lure its victims across Asia and raked in $46M  —  Hong Kong CNN —  She appeared to be a beautiful woman and in the minds of men across Asia, the video calls they spoke on confirmed their newfound love was real.
Washington Post:
Instagram rolls out new settings to fight sextortion, like hiding teens' follower lists from potential blackmailers; Meta says the crime is becoming more common  —  Scammers are targeting teens by getting hold of their intimate photos.  —  Instagram says it's rolling out a suite of new settings …
The Verge:
Filing: Google asks the US 9th Circuit for an emergency stay on the Epic ruling, saying the short time it was given to make Play Store changes risks user safety  —  The company says the imminent deadline to implement changes gives it little time to try to mitigate ‘serious risks.’
Financial Times:
How machine learning could have transformative effects on Africa's developing economies and societies, as some critics worry over a deepening digital divide  —  Machine learning could have transformative effects on developing economies and societies.  But some fear a deepening digital divide
Financial Times:
Sources: Uber has explored a possible bid for Expedia as it seeks to grow into a super app; Expedia, valued at nearly $20B, would be Uber's largest acquisition  —  Buying the travel website would be the ride-hailing group's biggest deal as it looks to diversify
Klara Durand / Politico:
Paris Court of Appeal orders complete blocks of several porn websites, including Xhamster, for their failure to roll out solid age verification systems.  —  The sites have 15 days to implement effective age controls.  —  This article is also available in: French
More: TechCrunch
Ina Fried / Axios:
Memo: Google's Gemini App team will join DeepMind under Demis Hassabis; Prabhakar Raghavan to become chief technologist, a new strategy role reporting to Pichai  —  Google announced the move in a memo from CEO Sundar Pichai, who also outlined a handful of other organizational changes.
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Google adds an option for NotebookLM users to customize audio summaries, launches a NotebookLM Business pilot, and says 80K+ organizations use the tool  —  Google Thursday updated the audio summarization feature of its AI note-taking and research assistant NotebookLM, which recently gained …

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