Techmeme
November 2, 2022, 2:05 PM

Top News

Tom Warren / The Verge:
Sony plans to launch the PlayStation VR2 on February 22 for $550, £530, or €600; preorders open November 15  —  Sony will launch its PS VR2 headset on February 22nd priced at $549.99.  The PS VR2 will be priced at $549.99 in the US, €599.99 across Europe, £529.99, and ¥74,980 in Japan.
Washington Post:
Elon Musk says Twitter will not reinstate banned accounts “until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks”  —  After the Zoom meeting, Musk tweeted that no suspended accounts would return to the site until there was a clear process for doing so
New York Times:
Washington Post:
Internal email: Twitter appears to be rushing out a “high”-risk “Paywalled Video” feature, letting users charge to view their videos, with Twitter taking a cut  —  The tool would let video creators charge users for access.  The team working on it flagged big potential pitfalls.
Elon Musk / @elonmusk:
Elon Musk says the blue checkmark system is “bullshit” and Twitter Blue will be $8/month with half the ads, priority in replies, mentions, and search, and more  —  Twitter's current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn't have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
Karen Hao / Wall Street Journal:
China's Zhengzhou industrial park, where Foxconn makes iPhones, begins a weeklong lockdown to counteract the “severe and complicated” spread of COVID-19  —  HONG KONG—The industrial park where Foxconn Technology Group's iPhone assembly plant is struggling to maintain production amid …
Chelsey Cox / CNBC:
FinCEN: US financial firms processed ~$1.2B in likely ransomware payments in 2021, up almost 3x YoY; ~75% of H2 2021 ransomware incidents were linked to Russia  —  - U.S. banks and financial institutions processed more than $1 billion in potential ransomware-related payments in 2021.
Wall Street Journal:
Netflix begins rolling out its Basic with Ads tier; sources say licensing negotiations with Disney, Comcast, Sony, Warner Bros., and Lions Gate are ongoing  —  Disney, NBCU and Sony are among the companies still negotiating licensing with the streaming service
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Apple TV 4K (2022) review: affordable, snappy performance, and USB-C remote, but no AirTag-like remote tracking, lackluster live TV, and somewhat stale design  —  Packing more speed than ever (and now HDR10 Plus) at a cheaper price, the Apple TV 4K is the best overall streamer on the market — even if tvOS is falling behind in places
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Snap partners with Amazon to let users try on eyewear in AR through dozens of new Shopping Lenses  —  Snap has landed a notable new partner for its augmented reality-powered Virtual Try-On shopping experience with today's news that Amazon will now offer Snapchat users the ability to digitally try …
More: GeekWire and Adweek
Maria Heeter / The Information:
Online banking startup Chime is laying off 12% of its 1,300-person workforce, citing “current market dynamics”; it had a $25B valuation in August 2021  —  Online banking startup Chime, which before this year's market meltdown had been widely seen as a candidate …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Roam, founded by Yext's Howard Lerman as a “cloud HQ” for distributed remote companies, raised a $30M Series A and $10.6M seed at a $95M post-money valuation  —  Roam, which bills itself as a “cloud HQ” for distributed, remote companies, today emerged from stealth with $30 million …
More: CNBC
Hamish McKenzie / On Substack:
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Dropbox says hackers stole code and some API keys from 130 GitHub repositories via a phishing campaign, but its core apps and infrastructure were unaffected  —  Dropbox disclosed a security breach after threat actors stole 130 code repositories after gaining access to one of its GitHub …
William Turvill / Press Gazette:
Source: Meta plans to end human curation of its UK Facebook News tab, contracted to a team of ~15 journalists at Upday, and switch to an AI system in early 2023  —  Meta plans to end human curation of the UK Facebook News tab, turning it into a fully automated product, Press Gazette has learned.
Washington Post:
Sources: the US is exploring whether it has legal authority to review Elon Musk's Twitter deal, which gives large foreign investors access to confidential data  —  Terms of the deal give large foreign investors access to confidential information about the social media platform
Brandy Betz / CoinDesk:
Tharsis Labs, which develops the Evmos cross-blockchain tool to connect Ethereum and Cosmos, raised $27M via a token sale led by Polychain Capital  —  Polychain Capital led the funding raise to accelerate the cross-chain decentralized app platform  —  Tharsis Labs - the core developer of Evmos …
More: The Block
Andy Baio / Waxy.org:
An engineer reimplemented Google AI's text-to-image diffusion model DreamBooth for Stable Diffusion, letting anyone cheaply and easily recreate artists' styles  —  Last weekend, Hollie Mengert woke up to an email pointing her to a Reddit thread, the first of several messages from friends and fans …

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