Techmeme
June 23, 2022, 5:20 PM

Top News

Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Google details the commercial spyware Hermit, used in Kazakhstan and Italy, targeting Android and iOS; the iOS version has six exploits, including two zero-days  —  The spyware has targeted victims in Kazakhstan and Italy  —  Security researchers at Lookout recently tied …
Maddie Ellis / Wall Street Journal:
Instagram begins testing tools to verify ages, starting with 17 and under, using either Yoti's facial video analysis, photo IDs, or adults vouching for users  —  Meta's new policy will make it tougher for teens to update to adult accounts.  But they can still lie about their age in the first place
New York Times:
Sources: Mark Zuckerberg's top priority is now the metaverse, not securing elections; Meta has ~60 people focused primarily on elections, down from 300+ in 2020  —  Mark Zuckerberg, who once said securing elections was “the most important thing,” has shifted Meta's focus to the metaverse.
Jeffrey Dastin / Reuters:
Amazon is working on letting Alexa mimic any voice after hearing less than a minute of audio, as a way to “make the memories last” of deceased family members  —  Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) wants to give customers the chance to make Alexa, the company's voice assistant, sound just like their grandmother — or anyone else.
Wall Street Journal:
Phillip Tracy / Gizmodo:
Microsoft announces gaming features for Edge, including a new homepage, exclusive free-to-play games, Clarity Boost for streamed games, and a performance option  —  This latest browser update adds a new gaming interface, graphics enhancements to Xbox Cloud Gaming, and easy access to free casual games.
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
OSOM, founded by ex-Essential employees, scraps its OV1 phone and partners with Solana to produce Saga, a $1,000 Web3-focused Android phone launching in Q1 2023  —  The OSOM OV1 was a new Android smartphone built from the bones of Essential, but it's now being rebranded as a crypto/web3 device, the “Solana Saga.”
Bloomberg:
A profile of Changpeng Zhao, who built Binance into the largest crypto exchange, as he navigates China's regulatory crackdown in a brutal crypto winter  —  During the first few months of this year—back when buying digital tokens named after dog memes was still seen, at least …
Washington Post:
The Senate's $52B US chip production bill, passed in June 2021, has been bogged down over unrelated disputes, like climate provisions, delaying the funds  —  Intel postpones Ohio groundbreaking as Congress faces a do-or-die moment on legislation to provide $52 billion for domestic computer chip production
Sander Lutz / Decrypt:
Coinbase plans to shut down its standalone, trader-focused Pro service by the end of 2022 and replace it with Advanced Trade across its main app and website  —  The standalone service will be replaced by Advanced Trade, a feature within the main Coinbase app.
Evan Conrad:
Crypto may be “more bad than good” but it has use cases like cutting out middlemen via decentralization, so the claim that it has “no use cases” is not rational  —  I've heard many smart people who I trust complain that “after 13 years, there are still no use cases for crypto.”
Cristiano Lima / Washington Post:
Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell says she does not support the bipartisan privacy bill, a significant blow to long-stalled federal protections for user data  —  Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell said she's not close to supporting a major proposal, dealing a significant blow to efforts to revive the long-stalled bill
Nilesh Christopher / Rest of World:
A hacktivist claims DALL-E-like Craiyon, formerly DALL-E mini, generated portraits of brown-skinned women in saris almost every time he ran a blank request  —  The images represent a glitch in the system that even its creator can't explain.  —  Like most people who are extremely online …
Tim De Chant / TechCrunch:
Vibrant Planet, a public-benefit startup that is developing software for forest management, has raised a $17M seed  —  For Allison Wolff, the 2018 wildfire season in California marked a turning point.  During that record-breaking year, she started asking a lot of questions.
Financial Times:
Singapore's fintech policy chief says the country will be “brutal and unrelentingly hard” on “any market bad behaviour” in the crypto industry  —  Stance marks shift in rhetoric from city-state that had courted digital currency companies
Francisco Pires / Tom's Hardware:
Cerebras says its “wafer-scale” chip set a record for the largest natural language processing AI model trained on a single device, at up to 20B parameters  —  Democratizing large AI Models without HPC scaling requirements.  —  Cerebras, the company behind the world's largest accelerator chip …
Bloomberg:
Seeking to regain relevance, screenshots show Clubhouse is testing private rooms, internally called Houses, to encourage friendlier social interactions  —  Clubhouse, the voice chat app that captured the attention of Hollywood and Silicon Valley early in the pandemic, is experimenting …

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