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July 12, 2023, 3:40 PM
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Top News

Colin Lecher / The Markup:
A congressional investigation led by Senator Elizabeth Warren finds popular tax filing tools “recklessly” sent data, like income, to Meta and Google for years  —  The investigation was opened in response to work published last year by The Markup
Tom Giles / Bloomberg:
Elon Musk forms xAI, a startup he will lead to “understand the true nature of the universe”; the staff has worked at Google, Microsoft, Tesla, OpenAI, and more  —  Elon Musk, who has hinted for months that he wants to build an alternative to the popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot …
New York Times:
Microsoft says Chinese hackers gained access to US government email accounts and had access to at least some accounts for a month before the breach was detected  —  The hack, by a Chinese group that the company said was intent on conducting espionage, went undetected for a month.  —  Reporting from Washington
Reuters:
The UK CMA will not accept new Microsoft and Activision Blizzard remedies but says a restructured deal may satisfy its concerns, subject to a new investigation  —  Britain's competition regulator said on Wednesday that a new restructured Microsoft-Activision deal could require a fresh merger investigation.
Cecilia Kang / New York Times:
Critics say FTC Chair Lina Khan's take-it-to-the-courts strategy is flawed, ahead of a House Judiciary Committee hearing to “examine mismanagement of the FTC”  —  Lina Khan has said a fear of defeat should not deter the agency from suing big tech companies.
Mike Scarcella / Reuters:
Experts: the FTC faces hurdles in any Activision ruling appeal as the facts work in Microsoft's favor; some question the judge's standard on harming competition
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Meta says Roblox is coming to Meta's Quest 2, Quest Pro, and Quest 3, starting with an open beta on App Lab “in the coming weeks”, with cross-platform support  —  / It's launching in open beta in the ‘coming weeks.’  —  Roblox will be coming to Meta's Quest VR headsets starting …
Richard MacManus / The New Stack:
A look at Meta's plan to adopt ActivityPub for Threads, how ActivityPub suits Meta's goals, and the technical challenges and social pressure facing the company  —  From a developer point of view, the fact that Meta's Threads app has quickly gone over 100 million sign-ups isn't the most interesting part of this latest Twitter clone.
Andrew Deck / Rest of World:
A look at the global freelancer labor force on sites like 99designs, some of whom are early generative AI adopters and are most at risk of being replaced by AI  —  The global labor force of outsourced and contract workers are early adopters of generative AI — and the most at risk.  —  R
Ash Parrish / The Verge:
Xbox tests reactive voice chat moderation, letting Xbox Insiders report 60-second audio clips of inappropriate voice messages for the Xbox safety team to review  —  Rolling out today to Xbox Insiders, the new reporting feature will allow players to capture and submit 60-second audio clips …
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Twitter's best defense against Threads may be to refocus on news and reactions from people users follow, leaving user growth via an algorithmic feed to Threads  —  If you're only going to tweet once every 11 years, then you better make it count; the best way to do just that is to pull off a well-executed meme:
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Threads can avoid Google+'s failure by not only leveraging the scale of Meta's existing apps, but by giving users a compelling enough reason to keep coming back
Toby Bochan / CoinDesk:
In a major policy shift, Google Play now lets developers incorporate tokenized digital assets, such as NFTs, into their Android apps and games  —  The company is opening up the ability for developers to let users buy, sell or earn digital assets in apps as long as they maintain transparency and adhere to other rules.
Chainalysis:
Crypto crime in H1 2023 vs. H1 2022: inflows to known illicit entities fell 65% YoY, scammers took nearly $3.3B less, and ransomware attackers made $175.8M more  —  2023 so far has been a year of recovery for cryptocurrency after a chaotic 2022, with prices of digital assets like Bitcoin up over 80% on the year as of June 30.
Jack Schickler / CoinDesk:
The European Securities and Markets Authority issues detailed proposals on crypto companies under the EU's MiCA law; more are due in October 2023 and early 2024  —  Consultations cover authorization and conflict-of-interest rules for crypto companies under the landmark digital assets regulation
Catherine Thorbecke / CNN:
A California law firm hits Google with a proposed class-action lawsuit, alleging data scraping for AI training without user consent, after a similar OpenAI case  —  Google was hit with a wide-ranging lawsuit on Tuesday alleging the tech giant scraped data from millions of users without …
David Kirton / Reuters:
Research: Huawei is plotting a return to the 5G smartphone market by the end of 2023 using its own 14nm+ chip design tools and SMIC's 7nm chipmaking process  —  - US-sanctioned giant likely to produce 5G chips domestically  — Chips expected to use Huawei EDA tools and SMIC production
Jennifer Elias / CNBC:
Emails: Urs Holzle, Google employee no. 8, plans to step back from management after 24 years, becoming an “individual contributor”, amid a Google Cloud shakeup  —  - Employee No. 8 Urs Holzle will step back from management after 24 years, CNBC has learned.
Noam Cohen / Bloomberg:
A look at Wikipedia in Russia, where the service remains popular after the Ukraine invasion, and the Kremlin-compliant rival Ruwiki from a long-serving editor  —  When a group of armed mercenaries seized a Russian regional capital and began marching toward Moscow in late June, verified information was hard to come by.
Heather Haddon / Wall Street Journal:
Domino's Pizza partners with Uber Eats in the US, the UK, Canada, and 25 other markets, reversing its long-held stance against working with food delivery apps  —  Pizza chain hopes to generate $1 billion in sales after losing business to apps  —  Domino's Pizza, hungry to claw back pizza sales …
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
The EU approves Broadcom's $61B VMware acquisition, provided Broadcom adheres to its access and interoperability commitments; UK and US approvals are pending  —  U.S. chipmaker Broadcom (AVGO.O) secured EU antitrust approval on Wednesday for its $61 billion proposed acquisition of cloud computing firm VMware …
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Linux distribution company SUSE plans to create a hard fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, investing $10M over the coming years in an RHEL-compatible distribution  —  A storm is brewing in open-source land that could change the Linux distro landscape  —  Today, SUSE announced that it is creating …

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:40 PM ET, July 12, 2023.

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From Mediagazer

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Paramount offers $15M to settle with President Trump, whose team wants $25M+, is seeking an apology from CBS News, and threatened another lawsuit

Ben Johansen / Politico:
Sources: all 800 full-time VOA staff are expected to receive reduction-in-force notices this week, after ~600 VOA contractors were dismissed earlier in May

Sarah Scire / Nieman Lab:
Interview with Times Media Group's Steve Strickbine, who employs 60 journalists across 60+ local US papers and says papers are better off diminished than dead

More News

Earlier Picks

Sheila Chiang / CNBC:
Temasek does not plan to invest in crypto firms due to “a lot of regulatory uncertainty”; the fund wrote down its $275M FTX investment to zero in November 2022
Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
Salesforce plans its first price hike in seven years, up 9% on average for Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Industries, and Tableau, in August 2023
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
Interviews with executives and staff at Anthropic describe how an obsession with AI safety and ties to effective altruism influence the AI startup's decisions
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