Techmeme
March 24, 2023, 1:50 AM
 

March 23, 2023

10:50 PM  •
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:  CISA releases an open-source Python-based utility to detect signs of malicious activity in Microsoft cloud environments
9:45 PM  •
SiliconHills:  Quantum computing startup Strangeworks raised a $24M Series A led by Hitachi Ventures with participation from IBM and Raytheon Technologies
8:50 PM  •
Rohan Goswami / CNBC:  Messages in Binance's public chatrooms show some employees and support volunteers helping customers bypass China's crypto ban, including evading its KYC checks
8:25 PM  •
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:  Warsaw-based Vue Storefront, which lets front-end developers build composable e-commerce sites, raised a $20M Series A extension led by Felix Capital
7:10 PM  •
Todd Spangler / Variety:  Twitter plans to wind down its legacy verified program and remove legacy verified checkmarks starting on April 1, 2023
6:20 PM  •
Bryan Schott / Salt Lake Tribune:  Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signs two bills regulating social media apps, including requiring age verification for all users and permission from parents for minors
5:45 PM  •
Ava Benny-Morrison / Bloomberg:  US prosecutors in New York charge Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon with eight counts, including securities fraud, commodities fraud, and wire fraud
4:20 PM  •
Bloomberg:  Shou Chew's answers to hostile questioning did little to calm the bipartisan fury aimed at TikTok, instead giving critics more fuel to insist the US ban the app
4:15 PM  •
The Verge:  Twitter Blue rolls out globally, but the subscription service is still missing promised features like prioritized ranking in conversations and half as many ads
4:02 PM  •
Bloomberg:  Montenegro says police detained Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon when he tried to fly to Dubai using falsified Costa Rican travel documents
3:30 PM  •
Steve Yegge / Sourcegraph Blog:  Why LLMs aren't a dumb fad like crypto, but the biggest thing since the World Wide Web, and on the coding front, the biggest thing since IDEs and Stack Overflow
2:35 PM  •
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:  Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Wolfram, Zapier, and others release the first third-party ChatGPT plugins
1:35 PM  •
OpenAI:  OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT plugins, including two of its own, a web browser and a code interpreter, and open sources the code for a knowledgebase retrieval plugin
12:45 PM  •
Lauren Feiner / CNBC:  TikTok CEO Shou Chew tells Congress that “after Project Texas is done” China-based ByteDance employees will no longer be able to access US TikTok data
12:25 PM  •
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:  Snap unveils AR Enterprise Services, offering its AR Lenses and Filters to businesses, and says 250M+ people out of 375M DAUs engage with AR on Snapchat daily
11:50 AM  •
Ryan McMorrow / Financial Times:  China “firmly opposes” a forced sale of TikTok, warning such a move would involve “technology export” and would “seriously damage” investor confidence in the US
10:50 AM  •
Tom Warren / The Verge:  The YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips was hacked on Thursday and posted videos for crypto scams to its 15.3M subscribers, the latest crypto scam breach on YouTube
10:06 AM  •
CoinDesk:  Do Kwon Arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister
9:51 AM  •
Adi Robertson / The Verge:  The FTC proposes banning difficult-to-cancel subscriptions via “click to cancel” rules requiring companies to make ending a subscription as simple as signing up
9:25 AM  •
Washington Post:  A recap of TikTok CEO Shou Chew's testimony before Congress, in which he struggled to address national security concerns over ByteDance's ownership of TikTok
8:52 AM  •
Reuters:  Block drops 10%+ after Hindenburg Research discloses a short position and alleges the company overstated user numbers and understated customer acquisition costs
8:35 AM  •
Khari Johnson / Wired:  OIG report: US officials working on Login.gov, used by dozens of sites, rejected verifying IDs via facial recognition over algorithmic bias, breaking NIST rules
8:12 AM  •
Bloomberg:  Sources: Apple plans to spend $1B per year to produce movies for release in thousands of theaters, a big increase from years past, seeking to grow TV+ awareness
8:05 AM  •
Madhumita Murgia / Financial Times:  Researchers warn of “industrial capture” in AI as companies entrench their power; companies' share of the biggest AI models grew from 11% in 2010 to 96% in 2021
7:47 AM  •
Chavi Mehta / Reuters:  Accenture plans to lay off 19,000 employees, or ~2.5% of its workforce, and lowers its annual forecasts, as the global economic slowdown weighs on IT spending
7:15 AM  •
Kate Park / TechCrunch:  South Korea-based luxury goods resale marketplace Kream raised a ~$168M Series C led by Altos Ventures at a ~$742M valuation, up from ~$306M in October 2021
6:41 AM  •
Giles Turner / Bloomberg:  Sources: Apple considers bidding for the streaming rights to a range of English soccer games, including to show Premier League games in the UK, following Amazon
6:10 AM  •
Patrick Temple-West / Financial Times:  Intel, IBM, Nvidia, and other chip companies join industrial materials businesses in lobbying against proposed clampdowns on “forever chemicals” across the US
5:31 AM  •
Cade Metz / New York Times:  Chatbot startup Character.AI raised $150M led by a16z at a $1B valuation, after a $43M seed in December 2021, and plans to raise more from “strategic partners”
4:55 AM  •
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:  Munich-based IntegrityNext, a service that helps companies audit their suppliers for ESG compliance, raised €100M from EQT Growth, its first outside investment
4:35 AM  •
Ellen Huet / Bloomberg:  A look at Replika's decision to block sexual content in its AI companion chatbot; 60% of paying customers had a romantic element in their Replika relationship
3:45 AM  •
Nikkei Asia:  Toshiba plans to support a ~$15.3B takeover offer from a coalition of ~20 companies including Japan Industrial Partners; JIP is expected to take Toshiba private
3:30 AM  •
Financial Times:  Sources: Arm seeks to raise chip design prices by charging device makers based on the value of a device instead of charging chipmakers based on a chip's value
2:40 AM  •
Alex Konrad / Forbes:  Canva debuts AI tools including Magic Design, which creates personalized templates from images, and Magic Presentation, which creates slideshows from prompts
2:25 AM  •
Stu Woo / Wall Street Journal:  A profile of TikTok CEO Shou Chew, a Singaporean army reservist and a former Goldman Sachs banker trying to “clarify” some things before a skeptical Congress
1:10 AM  •
New York Times:  A look at RightWingGPT, an experimental AI model fine-tuned by a researcher, who claims ChatGPT has a liberal bias, to answer questions with a conservative bent
12:05 AM  •
Tracy Wang / CoinDesk:  Court filings: FTX plans to recover $460M in assets, including $404M in cash, of the $475M seed capital transferred from Alameda to hedge fund Modulo in 2022

March 22, 2023

11:35 PM  •
Meta:  Meta launches an updated WhatsApp app for Windows that loads faster and enables group video calls with up to eight people and audio calls with up to 32 people
11:05 PM  •
Akash Sriram / Reuters:  Sam Altman says OpenAI fixed a “significant issue” in ChatGPT after a bug in an open-source library let some users see the titles of other users' chat history
10:35 PM  •
Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:  Jakarta-based Kredivo, formerly FinAccel, whose services include BNPL, personal loans, credit cards, and neobanking, raised a $270M Series D led by Mizuho Bank
8:15 PM  •
Yogita Khatri / The Block:  Singapore-based crypto exchange Bitget acquires a controlling stake in Cayman Islands-based crypto wallet startup BitKeep, investing $30M at a $300M valuation
5:55 PM  •
CNBC:  Filing: Coinbase received an SEC notice warning the exchange of potential US securities law violations that could lead to enforcement actions; COIN drops 10%+
5:20 PM  •
Washington Post:  A poll of 1,027 US adults: 41% support a TikTok ban, 25% oppose it, and 71% are concerned that ByteDance is based in China; 17% of US daily users support a ban
4:25 PM  •
CNBC:  Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and other celebrities agree to pay a combined $400K to settle SEC charges over promoting TRX and BTT without disclosing compensation
3:45 PM  •
Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:  The US SEC sues Tron founder Justin Sun and his companies for the alleged “unregistered offer and sale of crypto asset securities” TRX and BTT, fraud, and more
2:50 PM  •
Sean Endicott / Windows Central:  Microsoft launches Loop, its Notion and Asana competitor, in preview, letting users collaborate in shared Microsoft 365 workspaces on the web, Android, and iOS
1:40 PM  •
Theo Wayt / The Information:  Job listings site Indeed lays off ~2,200 people, or ~15% of its headcount, citing falling HR Tech revenue; Tokyo-based Recruit acquired Indeed in September 2012
12:25 PM  •
TechCrunch:  After the Russia-linked Clop ransomware gang claimed to hit 130 companies, victims are coming forward, many of which used Fortra's GoAnywhere file transfer tool
12:15 PM  •
Coco Liu / Bloomberg:  Microsoft announces a toolkit for developers to measure Xbox games' energy consumption “to the nearest millisecond”, helping the company establish a baseline
12:00 PM  •
Bloomberg:  Sources: Google, Meta, and Apple want Congress to limit Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, expiring at 2023's end if not reauthorized
11:26 AM  •
Chris Stokel-Walker / BuzzFeed News:  Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins says Midjourney banned him after he made images of a Donald Trump arrest; the company banned the word “arrested” in its tool
11:10 AM  •
Washington Post:  A look at ByteDance's and TikTok's lobbying before Shou Zi Chew's hearing, including Axios ads and private lawmaker meetings, mirroring Meta's well-worn tactics
10:45 AM  •
Sahil Patel / The Information:  Sources: Meta rehires veteran manager Nick Grudin, who left to join NFT startup Dapper Labs in August 2022, to oversee relationships with media and creators
10:25 AM  •
Chris Welch / The Verge:  Amazon introduces new Fire TVs and the cheaper TV lineup 2-Series, says 200M+ Fire TV devices have been sold, and expands Luna to the UK, Germany, and Canada
10:20 AM  •
Kate Beioley / Financial Times:  The UK CMA says Broadcom's $69B VMware acquisition may make servers more expensive, giving five working days to address concerns and warning of an investigation
10:11 AM  •
Dina Bass / Bloomberg:  GitHub announces Copilot X, a new Copilot version with chat and voice features using OpenAI's GPT-4 to help with certain coding tasks, available via a waitlist
10:03 AM  •
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:  Mozilla announces Mozilla.ai, an AI-focused startup with a $30M seed from the Mozilla Foundation to create a “trustworthy”, independent open-source AI stack
9:30 AM  •
Ashley Carman / Bloomberg:  Memo: Spotify has spent less than 10% of its $100M Creator Equity Fund, announced in February 2022 to promote diversity in music after the Joe Rogan controversy
9:05 AM  •
Kif Leswing / CNBC:  A look at San Francisco's Misalignment Museum, which displays art about AGI, including an apology to humans after a “misaligned” future AI wiped out humanity
7:35 AM  •
Matt Levine / Bloomberg:  A look at Balaji Srinivasan's weird $1M bitcoin bet, predicting one BTC will be worth $1M+ in 90 days, which is economically irrational but attracts attention
7:10 AM  •
Virginia Heffernan / Wired:  Inside TSMC's facilities in Taiwan, where Fab 18 makes 1 quintillion transistors for Apple every six months, and an interview with Chairman Mark Liu
6:45 AM  •
New York Times:  The US will find banning TikTok difficult due to its 150M+ US users, political ramifications for Biden including losing young voters, legal challenges, and more
6:25 AM  •
Carly Wanna / Bloomberg:  Okcoin suspended trading of CityCoins' NYCCoin and MiamiCoin on the Stacks protocol last week, citing low liquidity; both coins had received mayoral support
6:05 AM  •
Wall Street Journal:  Sources: TikTok sought to reassure advertisers in recent days and play down the threat of an outright US ban, hoping to keep brands from cutting their spending
5:45 AM  •
Cam Thompson / CoinDesk:  Magic Eden launches a Bitcoin NFT marketplace, supporting Hiro and Xverse wallets to let users trade Ordinal NFTs, expanding on SOL, ETH, and MATIC marketplaces
5:35 AM  •
Josh Ye / Reuters:  Tencent reports 2022 revenue down 1% YoY to ~$79.6B, the first annual drop and below estimates, and Q4 revenue up 1% YoY to ~$20.8B, as China's economy slowed
5:20 AM  •
Cade Metz / New York Times:  The Association for Computing Machinery awards Bob Metcalfe the 2022 Turing Award for the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet
5:00 AM  •
Luke Plunkett / Kotaku:  Ubisoft unveils Ghostwriter, an internal AI tool saving its scriptwriters time by creating first drafts and more realistic non-player character interactions
4:45 AM  •
Arian Khameneh / Wired:  Researchers: Iran's cyber army, or Cyberi, has ramped up spear-phishing and adopted new tactics to sow distrust among its citizens as political unrest continues
4:20 AM  •
Jaron Schneider / PetaPixel:  Amazon-owned digital photography site DPReview is closing on April 10; people can request to download photos or texts they've uploaded to the site until April 6
2:35 AM  •
Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times:  Just Eat Takeaway lays off 1,700 UK couriers and returns to a gig economy model, which CEO Jitse Groen had said “comes at the expense of society and workers”
2:00 AM  •
Reuters:  Nvidia announces the H800 chip, a modified H100 chip for export to China; the cloud units of Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and others are already using the H800
1:01 AM  •
Silicon Canals:  Paris-based XXII, a computer vision startup offering SaaS tool XXIICORE for deploying and configuring video stream analysis algorithms, raised a €22M Series A
12:05 AM  •
Alex Barinka / Bloomberg:  The US House Committee on Energy and Commerce posts TikTok CEO Shou Chew's prepared testimony, which says the company has spent ~$1.5B to safeguard US user data

March 21, 2023

11:45 PM  •
Tom Ivan / Video Games Chronicle:  Microsoft tells the UK CMA that 10 years is long enough for Sony to develop Call of Duty alternatives and that “there is no basis” to offer a longer agreement
11:25 PM  •
Chris Metinko / Crunchbase News:  Artera, formerly Well Health, which uses AI for cancer testing and personalized care, raised $90M from Coatue, J&J Innovation, Breyer, Marc Benioff, and others
11:05 PM  •
Bloomberg:  The US proposes banning CHIPS Act beneficiaries from expanding production capacity in “countries of concern” by 5% for advanced chips and 10% for legacy chips
9:00 PM  •
Jamie Crawley / CoinDesk:  Singapore-based tomi, a DAO aiming to build an “alternative internet” to promote free speech and access to uncensored information, raised $40M from DWF Labs
7:55 PM  •
Jonathan Greig / The Record:  Data leak site BreachForums plans to shut down following the arrest of alleged operator “Pompompurin”, citing fears law enforcement has access to its backend
7:00 PM  •
Mark Bergen / Bloomberg:  GP Bullhound: European tech startups raised €30.5B in debt in 2022, up from €15.9B in 2021, as the global tech slump made raising new equity more difficult
6:05 PM  •
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:  Instagram plans to roll out ads in search results globally in the coming months after initial tests and debuts Reminder Ads for opt-in upcoming event reminders
6:00 PM  •
AI Snake Oil:  OpenAI may have tested GPT-4 on its training data, violating the cardinal rule of ML, and GPT-4's exam performance says little about its real-world usefulness
5:35 PM  •
Ryan Smith / AnandTech:  Nvidia introduces six new Ada Lovelace RTX GPUs: five for laptops and one for desktops, the RTX 4000 Small Form Factor, available later in March 2023 for $1,250
4:45 PM  •
Jem Aswad / Variety:  IFPI report: subscription audio streaming revenue grew 10.3% to $12.7B in 2022, which ended with 589M paid subscribers; total streaming grew 11.5% YoY to $17.5B
3:55 PM  •
João Carrasqueira / XDA Developers:  Windows 11's Snipping Tool appears to have a bug similar to Pixel's Markup tool “aCropalypse” bug, which lets anyone reveal info edited out in some screenshots
3:43 PM  •
Stephanie Murray / The Block:  A US federal judge approves a settlement in the Celsius bankruptcy case that lets the company's custody account holders opt in to receive 72.5% of their crypto
2:45 PM  •
Bill Gates / GatesNotes:  The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the PC, the internet, and the mobile phone, and can reduce global inequities if risks are mitigated
2:15 PM  •
Wall Street Journal:  Feroot Security finds TikTok tracking pixels on 30 US government websites across 27 states; such trackers are ubiquitous and offered by Meta, Google, and others
2:00 PM  •
Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:  Intel says Raja Koduri, who joined as Chief Architect in 2017, plans to leave to found a startup focused on generative AI for gaming, media, and entertainment
1:30 PM  •
Alexandra S. Levine / Forbes:  An internal TikTok tool can access some personal data of Indian users who used the app before India's 2020 ban; an employee jokingly called the tool “NSA-To-Go”
1:25 PM  •
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:  Reykjavik-based Pearl Abyss' CCP Games raised $40M in financing led by a16z to develop a triple-A blockchain game set in the Eve Online universe
1:25 PM  •
Adi Robertson / The Verge:  Ahead of a March 23 US House hearing, TikTok posts a video of CEO Shou Chew rallying users to defend the app from a US ban, saying US 5M businesses use TikTok
12:20 PM  •
Aaron Holmes / The Information:  An internal Microsoft document instructs Azure salespeople to say that OpenAI's licenses have “limited enterprise-grade capabilities” and fewer privacy features
12:15 PM  •
Blake Schmidt / Bloomberg:  Grammarly appoints Global Head of Product Rahul Roy-Chowdhury as its CEO, starting on May 1, replacing Brad Hoover, who will stay on as a board member
12:05 PM  •
Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:  NVIDIA unveils cuLitho, a software library for computational lithography that TSMC and Synopsys have integrated into their tools and manufacturing processes
11:45 AM  •
Devindra Hardawar / Engadget:  Nvidia announces DGX Cloud, offering its AI supercomputers to companies looking to scale up their AI needs, starting at $36,999 per month for a single node
11:40 AM  •
Kyle Orland / Ars Technica:  Roblox rolls out AI tools, including Code Assist that lets creators use text prompts to create usable game code and Material Generator for in-game 2D surfaces
11:05 AM  •
Karl Bode / Techdirt:  Instead of myopically fixating on TikTok, the US should pass a real privacy law to regulate data brokers who sell info on US citizens to anyone, including China
10:45 AM  •
Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch:  Tel Aviv-based eToro raised $250M at a $3.5B valuation via a 2021 Advanced Investment Agreement, after calling off its SPAC plans in 2022 due to slowing growth
10:13 AM  •
James Vincent / The Verge:  Hands-on with Google's Bard, coming to waitlisted US and UK users: quick, fluid, more constrained than Bing, three responses per query, disclaimers, and more
9:55 AM  •
Krystal Hu / Reuters:  Unlearn.AI, which creates “digital twin” profiles of patients in clinical trials, raised $15M at a $265M valuation and adds OpenAI CTO Mira Murati to its board
9:30 AM  •
Jacquelyn Melinek / TechCrunch:  OP3N, which aims to be the “Web3 version of WhatsApp meets Amazon” and develops the blockchain chat app Superapp, raised a $28M Series A at a $100M valuation
9:16 AM  •
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:  Adobe announces Firefly, a “family” of creative generative AI models, and releases a DALL-E-like image generator and a WordArt-like stylized text generator
9:10 AM  •
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:  Microsoft rolls out Bing Image Creator, powered by OpenAI's “very latest DALL-E models”, to Bing Chat and Edge, letting users generate images from text prompts
8:50 AM  •
Bloomberg:  How Elon Musk's unilateral decision making at Twitter, SpaceX, and Tesla became a headache for the Biden administration, which worries about foreign influence
8:25 AM  •
Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post:  Tech industry group NetChoice, funded by Google and Meta, opens a litigation center, modeled on the Chamber of Commerce, to fight state laws and local lawsuits
7:30 AM  •
Noam Scheiber / New York Times:  A year after its Staten Island win, the Amazon Labor Union has endured setbacks and conflicts, including between President Chris Smalls and longtime organizers
7:15 AM  •
James Vincent / The Verge:  TikTok refreshes its Community Guidelines, expanding a section to cover “synthetic and manipulated media”, or deepfakes, as US political pressure increases
7:00 AM  •
Sankalp Phartiyal / Bloomberg:  Sources: Apple lobbied to change India's labor laws in the Tamil Nadu state, where Foxconn operates its largest iPhone plant, to help expand local production
6:25 AM  •
Derek B. Johnson / SC Media:  Research: 14% of new Fortune 500 board members in 2022 had cybersecurity experience, down from 17% in 2021; the SEC is finalizing new cyber risk reporting rules
5:45 AM  •
Abner Li / 9to5Google:  Google rolls out the Pixel Watch's March update two weeks later than expected, adding Fall Detection and promising to fix a Clock app bug delaying alarms
5:30 AM  •
Daniel Thomas / Financial Times:  London-based tech investors and founders say the government must back its pledges with policies and financial incentives or risk losing its lead to rival cities
5:10 AM  •
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:  OpenAI temporarily shut down ChatGPT after a bug in an open-source tool let some users see other users' chat history titles; some chat histories remain missing
4:25 AM  •
Sigal Samuel / Vox:  A case for slowing down AI over bias and future existential risks, despite its alleged inevitability, the AI arms race with China, and safety by experimentation
1:55 AM  •
Qianer Liu / Financial Times:  Sources: China is giving its most successful chip companies, like SMIC, Huawei, and Hua Hong, easier subsidy access and more control over state-backed research
12:40 AM  •
Mike Scarcella / Reuters:  Filing: Google denies intentionally destroying evidence in the US DOJ's antitrust lawsuit over its search business, responding to the US' bid for sanctions

March 20, 2023

11:45 PM  •
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:  Google suspends Pinduoduo's Play Store app “for security concerns” and flags several of the company's apps as malware, alerting users who had installed them
11:25 PM  •
Varun Mishra / Counterpoint Research:  Global premium smartphone sales rose 1% YoY in 2022, taking 50%+ of the smartphone market's revenue for the first time; Apple took 75% of the premium market
9:45 PM  •
Christine Hall / TechCrunch:  Singapore-based Reebelo, a marketplace for pre-owned phones, laptops, tablets, and more, raised a $29M Series A extension, bringing its Series A total to ~$50M
8:55 PM  •
Mandiant:  An overview of 55 zero-days exploited in 2022, the majority in Apple, Microsoft, and Google products; Chinese groups exploited more than other state sponsors
7:40 PM  •
Michael Kan / PCMag:  Study: GPT models and related technologies could impact 50%+ of the tasks needed in ~19% of US jobs, with higher-income jobs potentially facing greater exposure
6:45 PM  •
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:  Maryland-based Aembit launches its workload identity and access management service and announces a $16.6M seed from Ballistic Ventures and Ten Eleven Ventures
5:45 PM  •
David Shepardson / Reuters:  Ahead of Shou Zi Chew's testimony, TikTok confirms having 150M MAUs in the US, up from 100M in August 2020; in September 2021, TikTok reported 1B+ MAUs globally
4:45 PM  •
Ashley Capoot / CNBC:  Microsoft speech recognition subsidiary Nuance debuts Dragon Ambient eXperience Express, which uses GPT-4 to generate clinical note drafts after patient visits
4:30 PM  •
Brad Stone / Bloomberg:  Character.AI, recently valued at $1B, will likely face legal battles for brazenly letting users make and share chatbots of famous people or fictional characters
2:25 PM  •
Washington Post:  CASM Technology and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue report: the average weekly number of antisemitic tweets more than doubled after Elon Musk's acquisition
2:15 PM  •
Anton Shilov / AnandTech:  TrendForce: NAND flash memory revenue fell 45% YoY and 25% QoQ in Q4 2022 and is set to drop 8.1% QoQ in Q1 2023; NAND's per-bit costs may reach all-time lows
12:00 PM  •
Manya Saini / Reuters:  The FDIC plans to break up SVB and hold an auction for its traditional deposits unit and another for its private bank, after failing to find a buyer last week
11:40 AM  •
Matina Stevis-Gridneff / New York Times:  Sources: in 2021, the phone of a US and Greek national who worked on Meta's security and trust team was infected with Predator spyware from an Athens-based firm
11:00 AM  •
Josh Sisco / Politico:  Sources detail the FTC's pursuit of Amazon: possibly suing to stop the $1.7B iRobot acquisition, a retail antitrust case, a dark pattern investigation, and more
10:40 AM  •
Annie Palmer / CNBC:  Andy Jassy says Amazon plans to lay off an additional 9,000 employees, mostly in AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch, after cutting 18,000+ jobs in January 2023
10:20 AM  •
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:  Netflix plans to launch 40 games in 2023 and has a further 70 in development with its partners, after releasing 55 titles since adding games in November 2021
10:10 AM  •
Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times:  Microsoft plans to launch an app store for Android and iOS games as soon as 2024 if regulators clear its $75B Activision bid and the EU's DMA rules take effect
9:15 AM  •
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:  Runway, which helped make Stable Diffusion, unveils its Gen 2 system for creating three-second video snippets from text-based prompts, available via a waitlist
8:05 AM  •
Yoshihiro Sato / Bloomberg:  Taiwan's Ministry of Finance data: IC chip exports to China and Hong Kong fell 31.3% YoY in February 2023, the most since 2009 and above January's 27.1% fall
7:30 AM  •
Bryce Elder / Financial Times:  OpenAI's GPT-4 failed the CFA Institute's sample of the finance world's toughest exam, scoring eight out of 24, even though the answers are on the CFA's website
7:05 AM  •
ABC News:  An interview with Sam Altman on how “people should be happy” OpenAI is a “little bit scared of” its tools, GPT-4's rollout, large-scale disinformation, and more
6:20 AM  •
Matt Burgess / Wired:  How open-source intelligence researchers are using public sources of data to untangle the mystery of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, helping to debunk claims
5:45 AM  •
Bloomberg:  China's anti-graft watchdog opens an investigation into ex-Tsinghua Unigroup Chairman Zhao Weiguo, the latest executive ensnared in its chip corruption dragnet
4:20 AM  •
Raffaele Huang / Wall Street Journal:  Research: ByteDance's video editing app CapCut, launched in 2020, has 200M+ MAUs and had 400M+ downloads in 2022, up 43% YoY and above TikTok in recent weeks
1:45 AM  •
Washington Post:  India blocks mobile internet for a second day in Punjab, a state with ~27M people, as officials try to capture a Sikh separatist and curb “fake news” and unrest

March 19, 2023

9:25 PM  •
Carol E. Lee / NBC News:  Source: in his upcoming testimony to Congress on March 23, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew plans to reveal TikTok has 150M MAUs in the US, up from 100M in August 2020
8:25 PM  •
Pete Schroeder / Reuters:  The FDIC plans to sell all of Signature Bank's 40 branches to Flagstar Bank, as well as some Signature loans and deposits not in its digital banking business
6:30 PM  •
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:  Sources: Netflix's ad-supported tier reached ~1M MAUs in the US after its second month, and the company fulfilled its forecasted deliveries to advertisers
1:10 PM  •
Faiz Siddiqui / Washington Post:  As concerns over Tesla's Full Self-Driving rise, former employees blame Elon Musk's erratic leadership, cost-cutting measures like removing radar, and more
12:40 PM  •
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:  Researchers launch Glaze, a free app to help artists prevent AI models from stealing their “artistic IP” by adding nearly imperceptible changes to their art
8:05 AM  •
Abner Li / 9to5Google:  Researchers detail “aCropalypse”, a bug in Google Pixel's Markup fixed in March 2023, where some edited screenshots can be retroactively unredacted or uncropped
2:00 AM  •
Anna Tong / Reuters:  Replika and Character.AI now block adult content in their chatbots, angering users who became deeply involved with them, some considering themselves married

Sponsor Posts

Brightspot:
Is your CMS solving your content problems, or creating new ones?  —  In a commissioned study written and conducted by Forrester, we revealed that 72% plan to change their CMS platform, is your organization one of them?
Prelay:
How Public Tech Companies De-risk Millions in Revenue Loss  —  Complex products and hybrid teams are today's major growth challenges.  With 50-70% of revenue driven by internal teams beyond sales, how is your org adapting?
Zoho:
UCaaS and hybrid work: A match made in heaven  —  The pandemic, the option to WFM (work from the mountains), and an abundance of co-working spaces have fueled the rise of hybrid work.
Vesto:
The treasury management platform built for startups  —  Put your idle cash to work, earn higher yields, and extend your runway with Vesto.