Techmeme
October 24, 2023, 11:20 AM

Top News

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
A look at Nightshade and Glaze, tools made by researchers at UChicago that help artists “poison” their work to confuse or break AI models that later train on it  —  A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it's scraped …
Marissa Newman / Bloomberg:
Google disables live traffic conditions in Israel and the Gaza Strip for its Maps and Waze apps, a source says at the request of the Israel Defense Forces  —  - Israeli army asked tech giant to limit real-time information  — Google took similar action in Ukraine during war with Russia
David Pierce / The Verge:
Automattic plans to acquire Texts, a $15 per month messaging app that works with WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal, iMessage, and more, for $50M  —  Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and a number of other popular web properties, just made a different kind …
Reuters:
Sources: Nvidia has begun designing ARM CPUs for Windows PCs, and AMD also plans to build ARM chips; source: Nvidia and AMD could start selling them in 2025  —  Nvidia (NVDA.O) dominates the market for artificial intelligence computing chips.  Now it is coming after Intel's longtime stronghold of personal computers.
Benedict Evans:
A Twitter user since 2007 reflects on leaving due to Elon Musk swapping stasis at the company for chaos, his constant bullshitting, and spreading toxic content  —  Twitter always used to look a lot like Craigslist.  It stumbled into something that a lot of people found very useful …
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Sources: many people inside Apple do not believe its own AI/ML team can deliver on generative AI, and worry that the company will only use its own team's output  —  Speaking of Mark Gurman, he has an interesting bit about Apple's AI efforts in his latest Power On column:
Dan Milmo / The Guardian:
AI experts share a paper ahead of the UK's AI summit in Bletchley Park warning of worrying capabilities in current AI systems and seeking urgent governance  —  Authors and academics also warn development of advanced systems ‘utterly reckless’ without safety checks
Kenza Bryan / Financial Times:
EU environmental groups criticize Apple branding new Apple Watches as “carbon neutral” and using credits to cancel out the 7kg to 12kg of emissions per unit  —  iPhone maker flags credentials of its latest Watch products as EU seeks to clamp down on ‘greenwashing’
David Pierce / The Verge:
A look at POSSE, a decade-old idea that a user should Publish (on your) Own Site and Syndicate Elsewhere, and the challenges of building a system based on that  —  The platform era is ending.  Rather than build new Twitters and Facebooks, we can create a stuff-posting system that works better for everybody.
Ashley Carman / Bloomberg:
Spotify Q3: revenue up 11% YoY to €3.4B, MAUs up 26% to 574M, subscribers up 16% YoY to 226M, and €32M operating income, vs. a €44.6M loss est.; SPOT jumps 9%+  —  Spotify Technology SA rose the most since January after the music-streaming giant reported third-quarter results …
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
Xreal, formerly Nreal, announces the $399 Xreal Air 2 and $449 Air 2 Pro, AR glasses with brighter Micro OLED displays, available in five countries in November  —  Xreal is opening preorders for its latest generation of augmented reality glasses, the Xreal Air 2 and Air 2 Pro …
Suzanne Smalley / The Record:
Q&A with FTC Commissioner and digital privacy expert Alvaro Bedoya on the agency's plan to hire child psychologists to understand social media's impact on kids  —  I saw and I heard stories from parents about the mental health issues that their children were experiencing and how both the parents and …
Tyler Cowen / Marginal Revolution:
NBC News:
The White House designates 31 communities across the US as regional Tech Hubs that can compete for $40M to $75M each in grants, under the CHIPS and Science Act  —  The hubs are located in 32 states and Puerto Rico and will be able to compete for $40 million to $75 million each in grants.
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Hands-on with DALL-E 3: suggests more detailed prompts, restrictive, denies art requests in the style of living artists, and shows how quickly AI is improving  —  To understand how quickly AI is improving, forget ChatGPT — use an image generator  —  Earlier this month …
More: Synced, Mashable, and CNET
Financial Times:
Analysts: Chinese AI startup SenseTime's pivot from government surveillance work to data centers now seems doomed by new US export controls on powerful AI chips  —  Hong Kong-based AI company SenseTime faces ‘end of the road’ for data centre ambitions  —  SenseTime, once the darling …
Karissa Bell / Engadget:
Meta is “listening to feedback” after some users noticed the company is cross-posting Threads posts to users' Facebook feeds without offering an opt-out option  —  The company said it's “listening to feedback” about the feature.  —  Meta is starting to ramp up its growth-hacking tactics …
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
After Unciphered developed a crack for an old IronKey USB drive to recover 7,002 BTC, the owner declines their help because he agreed to work with other experts  —  Stefan Thomas lost the password to an encrypted USB drive holding 7,002 bitcoins.  One team of hackers believes they can unlock it—if they can get Thomas to let them.
Brian Steinberg / Variety:
Streaming services, including Hulu, Peacock, and Max, are increasingly showing “pause ads”, which appear a few seconds after a viewer pauses the programming  —  Time for a different sort of commercial break.  —  Any subscriber to the ad-supported version of Hulu is bound …

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