Techmeme
July 13, 2023, 2:55 PM

Top News

Bloomberg:
The US arrests and charges former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky with six counts, including wire fraud; the SEC, CFTC, and FTC sue Mashinsky and the crypto company  —  Alex Mashinsky, the former chief executive officer of Celsius Network Ltd., was accused by prosecutors of orchestrating …
Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post:
Document: the FTC sends OpenAI a 20-page demand for records on the risks of its AI models and a March 2023 security incident over payment-related information  —  The agency's demand for OpenAI's documents marks the company's greatest U.S. regulatory threat to date
Sam Schechner / Wall Street Journal:
Google updates Bard with support for 43 more languages, including Arabic, and releases the chatbot in Europe and Brazil after adding new privacy features  —  Latest version to also include a privacy hub for all users  —  Google is betting a new version of its artificial-intelligence chatbot will say hallo …
Sara Fischer / Axios:
The AP and OpenAI sign a two-year deal; the AP gets access to OpenAI's tech in return for licensing some of its text archive dating back to 1985 for AI training  —  The Associated Press on Thursday said it reached a two-year deal with OpenAI, the parent company to ChatGPT, to share access to select news content and technology.
Tim Hardwick / MacRumors:
Apple launches Tap to Pay on iPhone in the UK, starting with Revolut and Tyl by NatWest as the first platforms, following the US, Australia, and Taiwan  —  Apple has announced the launch of Tap to Pay on iPhone in the United Kingdom, allowing independent sellers, small merchants …
Tom Hals / Reuters:
A US judge says Ripple's XRP sales to sophisticated investors violated securities law but that sales on exchanges were not offers of securities; XRP jumps 50%+  —  U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres said Ripple Labs Inc's institutional sales of its XRP digital token violated federal law …
The Verge:
The FTC files to appeal a US court ruling that cleared the way for Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard; the existing TRO expires at 11:59pm PT on July 14  —  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says it is appealing a recent US federal court order that cleared the way for Microsoft to purchase Activision Blizzard.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Apple adds bilingual support for five Indic languages to Siri in beta; Google Assistant got multilingual support in 2018 and Alexa got the feature in 2019  —  Apple released its first set of public beta versions of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma on Wednesday.
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Apple updates macOS Sonoma to bring iCloud Keychain passwords to non-Safari browsers for the first time, expanding on a Chrome extension  —  The macOS Sonoma update that is in testing allows Mac owners who opt to use Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or another browser to use Apple's Password Manager for filling passwords.
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
GitHub launches support for passkeys in public beta, letting users who opt in upgrade from security keys to passkeys, and use those in place of password and 2FA  —  GitHub announced today the introduction of passwordless authentication support in public beta, allowing users to upgrade from security keys to passkeys.
Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:
At a congressional hearing, FTC's Lina Khan defends herself against attacks from Republicans over alleged ethics violation and aggressive antitrust enforcement  —  Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan fended off Republican attacks over her adherence to ethics laws and aggressive antitrust enforcement …
Financial Times:
Sources: Meta plans to widely release a commercial version of LLaMA imminently that companies can customize, after a version for researchers in February 2023  —  Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google are surging ahead in Silicon Valley development race  —  Meta is poised to release …
Washington Post:
In June, the US State Department told Microsoft that its emails in Azure were hacked; attackers stole a Microsoft key and hacked ~25 organizations' emails  —  The State Department discovered the Microsoft vulnerability, which affected unclassified government systems, last month
New York Times:
Allison Johnson / The Verge:
Nothing Phone (2) review: neat light strips, a useful always-on display, and four years of software support, but only splash resistant and not Verizon certified  —  Form, function, and a good midrange phone. … The Nothing Phone 2 is better than the Phone 1 in a lot of small ways.
Kyle Chayka / New Yorker:
A writer details using AI startup Writer's LLM to generate text in his writing style and says that most of the tool's “insights” felt hollow or approximated  —  A new wave of artificial-intelligence startups is trying to “scale language” by automating the work of writing.
Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post:
Twitter asks a US federal court to terminate an FTC order that puts restrictions on its data security practices and to stay an FTC deposition of Elon Musk  —  The company asked the federal court to terminate an order with the agency hours before Chair Lina Khan testified on Capitol Hill

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Aaron Holmes / The Information:
Davey Alba / Bloomberg:
Ash Parrish / The Verge:
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg: