Techmeme
March 30, 2023, 9:35 PM

Top News

Rebekah Valentine / IGN:
ESA cancels E3 2023, after Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, and Ubisoft announced they would not attend the event originally scheduled for June 13 to June 16  —  The show “did not garner the sustained interest necessary”  —  Almost a year after announcing its return, the Entertainment Software …
New York Times:
Document: Twitter plans to exempt its top 500 advertisers and 10K most-followed, previously verified organizations from paying $1,000 per month for a checkmark  —  Mr. Musk requested a meeting with Lina Khan, the chair of the F.T.C., which has been investigating Twitter's privacy and data practices.
Bloomberg:
Pathmatics: the top 10 advertisers on Twitter spent just $7.6M on ads in the past two months, down 89% from the $71M spent from September to October 2022  —  In the weeks after Elon Musk acquired Twitter Inc., hundreds of advertisers paused spending on the platform, wary of the changes …
Oliver Darcy / @oliverdarcy:
[Thread] The New York Times and Los Angeles Times don't plan to buy Twitter Blue for their accounts; NYT, LAT, and BuzzFeed won't reimburse reporters for Blue  —  New: The New York Times says it is not planning to pay for Twitter verification: “We aren't planning to pay the monthly fee for verification of our institutional Twitter accounts,” a spokesperson tells me.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Microsoft fixed an Azure vulnerability after researchers found that the flaw could have let anyone alter Bing search results and access users' Office 365 data  —  A dangerous vulnerability was detected in Microsoft's Bing search engine earlier this year that allowed users to alter search results …
Chloe Xiang / VICE:
Some signatories of the open letter to pause AI training walk back their positions, others turn out to be fake, and many experts disagree with its proposal  —  The letter has been signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Andrew Yang, and leading AI researchers, but many experts and even signatories disagreed.
Matt Novak / Forbes:
As his companies lag OpenAI, Elon Musk tries to launder his AI “concerns” through the Future of Life Institute, which is primarily funded by the Musk Foundation  —  Elon Musk signed an open letter on Tuesday calling for a six-month pause in the development of artificial intelligence tools …
Washington Post:
Midjourney ends free trials, citing “extraordinary demand” and “abuse”, after fake images of Trump getting arrested and Pope Francis wearing a coat went viral  —  Midjourney, the year-old firm behind recent fake visuals of Trump and the pope, illustrates the lack …
The Guardian:
Leaked documents from Moscow-based NTC Vulkan reveal the company helps the GRU, FSB, and SVR with hacking operations, national infrastructure attacks, and more  —  Documents leaked by whistleblower angry over Ukraine war  —  Private Moscow consultancy bolstering Russian cyberwarfare
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: to comply with EU privacy rulings, Meta plans to let users opt out of some highly personalized ads via an online form that Meta must review and approve  —  Facebook, Instagram parent hopes plans to alter a privacy approach that would limit the impact from EU orders
Financial Times:
Futurism:
BuzzFeed quietly started publishing fully AI-generated SEO-driven travel posts by non-editorial staff on March 14; a spokesperson calls the posts an experiment  —  Earlier this year, when BuzzFeed announced plans to start publishing AI-assisted content, its CEO Jonah Peretti promised the tech would be held to a high standard.
Karissa Bell / Engadget:
Invite-only Twitter alternative T2 plans to let Twitter users who are about to lose their checkmark on April 1 to carry over the verification to its service  —  With Elon Musk set to pull verification from thousands of users who were verified under the company's previous leadership …
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Researchers say hackers have compromised the VoIP desktop client of 3CX's Phone System, used by 600K+ companies and 12M+ DAUs, in an ongoing supply chain attack  —  A digitally signed and trojanized version of the 3CX Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) desktop client is reportedly being used …
Blake Brittain / Reuters:
Apple wins a US appeal to uphold a patent tribunal's ruling over two of VirnetX's VPN patents that invalidated a $502.8M patent infringement verdict from 2020  —  Apple Inc (AAPL.O) convinced a U.S. appeals court on Thursday to uphold a patent tribunal's ruling that could imperil …
Manya Saini / Reuters:
Memo: Block says 44M of its 51M+ Cash App MAUs were verified via its IDV program as of December 2022, after Hindenburg claimed Block overstated user numbers  —  Block Inc (SQ.N) said on Thursday 44 million of its more 51 million monthly active customers on Cash App were verified through its identity program as of Dec. 31.
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
An AI tech ethics group asks the FTC to investigate OpenAI, saying its AI text generation tool rollout has been “biased, deceptive, and a risk to public safety”  —  An artificial intelligence-focused tech ethics group has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate OpenAI …
Hartley Charlton / MacRumors:
Kuo: Apple's MR headset may not appear at WWDC 2023, as the company pushed back mass production to Q3 amid doubts about the device creating an “iPhone moment”  —  Apple has again pushed back mass production of its mixed-reality headset and the device may not appear …
Meir Orbach / CTech:
env0, which develops Infrastructure as Code workflow automation and management software, raised $18.1M led by Venture Guides, bringing Series A total to $35.1M  —  The env0 platform enables users and teams to collaborate and provide self-service cloud deployments
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Report: Google AI engineer Jacob Devlin quit to join OpenAI in January 2023 after complaining Bard was being trained on ChatGPT data; Google denies the charge  —  Google's Bard hasn't exactly had an impressive debut — and The Information is reporting that the company is so interested …
Taylor Soper / GeekWire:
Seattle-based Fixie, a cloud service for helping developers integrate any LLM into their applications, raised a $17M seed led by Redpoint Ventures  —  The news: Fixie, a new Seattle-based startup aiming to help companies fuse large language models into their software stack, raised a $17 million seed round.

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