Techmeme
August 23, 2023, 1:30 PM

Top News

Tom Warren / The Verge:
Sony unveils the PlayStation Portal, an 8-inch handheld console that can stream games from a PS5 over Wi-Fi in 1080p at 60fps, available later in 2023 for $200  —  Sony is officially launching its portable PlayStation later this year, the PlayStation Portal remote player.
Bo Moore / IGN:
Hands-on with Sony PlayStation Portal: a slightly weird design but lighter than the Switch, expansive and vibrant 60Hz LCD screen, no Bluetooth, and needs a PS5  —  PlayStation Portal-ble  —  Sony has a storied, if a bit neglected, history with handheld gaming.
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Sony announces the $200 Pulse Explore headphones, utilizing its new PlayStation Link tech to connect to the Portal and offer low-latency performance  —  In addition to announcing the price of its upcoming PlayStation Portal remote gaming gadget, Sony also shared new details today …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
IBM unveils watsonx Code Assistant for IBM Z, which uses a code-generating AI model to translate COBOL code into Java, set for general availability in Q4 2023  —  COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages in use, dating back to around 1959.
Joe Tidy / BBC:
A UK court finds 18-year-old Arion Kurtaj and a 17-year-old were part of Lapsus$, the group that hacked Uber, Nvidia, and Rockstar Games in 2021 and 2022  —  A court has found an 18-year-old from Oxford was a part of an international cyber-crime gang responsible for a hacking spree against major tech firms
Wall Street Journal:
Investigation: despite scaling back in Russia in 2022, Binance continues to handle substantial ruble trading, helping clients evade sanctions via intermediaries  —  Binance is helping Russians move money abroad, potentially adding to its sprawling legal problems in the U.S. The cryptocurrency giant …
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
AirPods Max can malfunction or suddenly stop working because of users' sweat or condensation inside of earcups, an issue Apple has not publicly acknowledged  —  Apple's $550 flagship headphones have a problem: They can malfunction, or suddenly stop working entirely, because of users' sweat …
Elizabeth Napolitano / CoinDesk:
A US judge sentences ex-OpenSea product head Nate Chastain to three months in prison for making ~$50K via insider trades, in the first NFT insider trading case  —  Chastain was found guilty on charges of buying and selling NFTs from collections he knew would later be featured on his former company's home page.
Laura Noonan / Financial Times:
Bank for International Settlements: crypto has amplified, rather than reduced, financial risks in less developed economies, offering only an “illusory” appeal  —  Currency's appeal as a low-cost solution for countries with high inflation is ‘illusory’, says BIS
Yueqi Yang / Bloomberg:
Binance.US partners with MoonPay to let users use debit or credit cards and Apple Pay or Google Pay to buy Tether, which can then be used to buy other tokens  —  - Payment partnership allows users to convert dollars to Tether  — Exchange has been unable to process users' dollars directly
Bloomberg:
SIA: Huawei is building secret chip fabrication facilities across China that would let the company skirt US sanctions and is receiving ~$30B in state funding  —  - Tech giant is reportedly getting $30 billion in state support  — Biden administration monitoring and ready to take action
Elad Gil / Elad Blog:
LLMs, Transformers, and diffusion models represent an entirely new AI era and discontinuity from the past machine learning capabilities of the CNN/RNN/GAN world  —  Rather then view LLMs, Transformers, and diffusion models as part of a continuum with past “AI”, it is worth thinking …
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
An analysis of Google's policy dilemma as YouTube and UMG explore AI licensing, Google scrapes the web to train its AI, and lawsuits could upend copyright law  —  Google has made clear it is going to use the open web to inform and create anything it wants, and nothing can get in its way.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
OpenAI adds fine-tuning to GPT-3.5 Turbo, charging training and usage fees to customize the model with unique data to improve performance for specific use cases  —  OpenAI customers can now bring custom data to the lightweight version of GPT-3.5, GPT-3.5 Turbo — making it easier to improve …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Spotify introduces new podcaster tools, including customized pages, impression analytics, controls for previews, and a new dashboard for Megaphone publishers  —  Following Apple's announcement of podcast creator tools for subscriptions on Monday, Spotify today also introduced its own latest developments …
More: The Verge and iLounge
Kevin Jiang / Toronto Star:
Experts warn that Meta, and possibly Google, blocking trusted news outlets in Canada will worsen misinformation as the world nears a “precipice” of AI content  —  As it becomes increasingly difficult to trust what we read online, experts say it's critical to learn how to tell real media from fake — here's how.
Sarah Frier / Bloomberg:
LinkedIn is benefiting from recent social media upheavals, as the only place where old-school self-promotion still works; sharing was up 41% YoY in spring 2023  —  The professional network is benefiting from upheavals elsewhere in the social media landscape.  —  The biggest social media platforms all have their niches.
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Antenna: Netflix added ~2.6M new US users in July, more than any other paid streaming service but down 26% from June 2023; ~23% signed up for Netflix's ad tier  —  - The streaming service had more sign-ups than any other in July  — Netflix user growth in the US had stopped in recent years
Ryan Weeks / The Block:
The FBI details North Korea's Lazarus-tied actors, responsible for the Alphapo, CoinsPaid, and Atomic Wallet hacks, and says they may try to sell $40M+ in BTC  —  - The warning, issued today, comes after a series of high profile crypto heists carried out by North Korea-affiliated Lazarus Group in recent years.

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More News

Scharon Harding / Ars Technica:
Ioannis Kouvakas / Just Security:

Earlier Picks

The Information:
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Makena Kelly / The Verge:
Shubham Sharma / VentureBeat:
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Dave James / PC Gamer:
Tom Warren / The Verge: