Techmeme
August 18, 2023, 12:15 PM

Top News

MK Manoylov / The Block:
OpenSea plans to make creator fees optional for new collections from August 31, and enforce creator fees on certain existing collections through February 2024  —  - OpenSea has opted to make creator fees optional for new collections, starting in September.  — The platform will disable …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Meta updates Threads with a Repost tab on users' profile pages and adds reposts to the reverse-chronological “Following” feed  —  Threads is adding reposts (aka retweets) to its reverse-chronological “Following” feed, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced in a Threads post on Thursday.
Simon Sharwood / The Register:
PE firm EQT plans to take the German software company SUSE private at €16/share, below the €30 price of its 2021 IPO but above Thursday's closing price of €9.6  —  Buyout offer is at €16 per share, compared to €30 at its 2021 IPO  —  Linux-loving software house SUSE …
David Jeans / Forbes:
London-based credit card processor Checkout.com abruptly terminates its contract with Binance citing reports of regulatory actions and money laundering concerns  —  Checkout.com, the London-based credit card processing company that ballooned its business model by servicing billions …
Zeba Siddiqui / Reuters:
Mandiant: the use of AI to conduct politically-motivated online influence campaigns has grown in recent years, but the impact of such campaigns has been limited  —  Google-owned U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant said on Thursday it had seen increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) …
Zeke Faux / Bloomberg:
A book excerpt traces “wrong number” texts to Chinese gangs in Cambodia and Myanmar that use forced labor to run pig butchering scams involving Tether  —  The mysterious WhatsApp message arrived one night in August 2022, while I was out at a bar with a friend: “Hi David, I'm Vicky Ho don't you remember me?”
Kevin McLaughlin / The Information:
Sources: Meta is preparing to release “Code Llama”, a free code-generating AI model based on Llama 2, as soon as next week  —  Meta Platforms is preparing to launch software to help developers automatically generate programming code, a challenge to proprietary software from OpenAI …
Taylor Hatmaker / TechCrunch:
Twitch plans to roll out a long-requested anti-harassment feature in the next few weeks, letting streamers block banned users from watching streams  —  Twitch's chat ban tools have been around for ages, but the platform is about to hand streamers a way to control who can watch a stream to begin with.
Ashley Carman / Bloomberg:
Internal doc: Spotify weighed removing white noise podcasts and redirecting users to “talk” content, which would boost the company's annual gross profit by €35M  —  An internal document shows that white noise podcasts account for 3 million daily consumption hours on the platform
CNN:
Lyft and Uber threaten to leave Minneapolis if the mayor signs a minimum wage bill on August 23 that mandates at least $1.40/mile and $0.51/minute for drivers  —  New York CNN —  —  Lyft and Uber threatened to stop doing business in Minneapolis after the city council adopted a new rule Thursday …

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More News

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
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Earlier Picks

Sara Ashley O'Brien / Wall Street Journal:
Umar Shakir / The Verge:
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Sam Kessler / CoinDesk: