Techmeme
May 31, 2023, 4:40 PM

Top News

Cynthia Littleton / Variety:
Activision CEO Bobby Kotick says he was humbled and outraged by toxic workplace culture claims and blames “outside forces” for most of Activision's image issues  —  Bobby Kotick has a secret: He was ready to buy Time Warner a few years ago.The CEO of Activision Blizzard drops …
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
Eclypsium: a firmware flaw in 271 Gigabyte motherboards could let hackers install malware when the PC restarts; Gigabyte plans a fix, but problems could persist  —  Hidden code in hundreds of models of Gigabyte motherboards invisibly and insecurely downloads programs—a feature ripe for abuse, researchers say.
Bloomberg:
Filing: Fidelity marks down the value of its Twitter stake, estimating the company is worth ~33% of the $44B that Elon Musk paid, down from 44% in November 2022  —  Twitter is now worth just one-third of what Elon Musk paid for the social-media platform, according to Fidelity …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Apple touts an Analysis Group study saying its App Store ecosystem generated $1.1T in 2022, up 29% YoY; $910B came from the sale of physical goods and services  —  Ahead of Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference next week, the company is offering an update on its app ecosystem with the release …
Bloomberg:
Filing: Amazon's Ring agrees to pay $5.8M to settle FTC allegations that until 2017, Ring gave employees and third-party contractors access to customers' videos  —  Amazon.com Inc. agreed to pay $30.8 million to resolve two cases brought by the Federal Trade Commission Wednesday related to privacy lapses by its smart devices.
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Reddit client Apollo's developer says Reddit plans to charge $12K for 50M API requests and that he would need to pay $20M per year to keep operating the app  —  Popular Reddit app Apollo might not be able to operate as is in the future due to planned API pricing that Reddit is implementing.
Mia Sato / The Verge:
Priya Anand / Bloomberg:
An investigation into Papa, a TaskRabbit-like service for seniors that has raised ~$240M, finds dozens of allegations of harassment, assault, theft, and more  —  If you've been to an annual open enrollment fair in the past few years, you may have noticed a new eldercare benefit with the unusual name of Papa.
Oliver Whang / New York Times:
A look at the BabyLM Challenge, which asks teams to create language models using datasets less than one-ten-thousandth the size of those used by advanced LLMs  —  Teaching fewer words to large language models might help them sound more human.  —  When it comes to artificial intelligence chatbots, bigger is typically better.
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
How the Shoggoth, a character from a 1936 H.P. Lovecraft novella, became a meme among AI workers as a metaphor for not fully understanding LLMs' inner workings  —  The Shoggoth, a character from a science fiction story, captures the essential weirdness of the A.I. moment.
Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:
Meta asks a US court to block FTC's attempt to impose new sanctions for alleged violation of a 2020 settlement  —  Meta Platforms Inc. is asking a federal court to bar the Federal Trade Commission from moving forward with an agency proceeding to revise its 2020 privacy settlement.
Nikkei Asia:
How Taiwan became indispensable in the electronics supply chain, creating Taiwanese, Chinese, and US interdependence that has deepened even as tensions rise  —  In the days after then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan last year, Taiwanese suppliers to U.S. tech giants including Apple …

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