Techmeme
November 29, 2023, 6:45 PM

Top News

Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
The US sanctions Sinbad, a crypto mixer allegedly used by the North Korean Lazarus hacking group, and the US, the Netherlands, and Poland seize the service  —  The U.S. Department of the Treasury has sanctioned the Sinbad cryptocurrency mixing service for its use as a money-laundering tool by the North Korean Lazarus hacking group.
Alex Ivanovs / Stack Diary:
Researchers develop a “divergence attack” that makes ChatGPT emit sequences copied from its training data, by prompting the LLM to repeat a word numerous times  —  Large language models, like ChatGPT, are trained on vast amounts of text data from books, websites, and other sources.
Mike Seymour / fxguide:
Unity plans to cut 265 jobs, or 3.8% of its workforce, and end its services deal with VFX company Wētā FX to focus on its core business in a “company reset”  —  UPDATE: Scroll down for a statement from WētāFX:  —  Reuters is reporting that Unity Software …
CBC News:
Google and Canada reach an agreement in their dispute over the country's Online News Act; Google plans to pay news companies around CA$100M per year, or ~$74M  —  Agreement comes 3 weeks before Online News Act rules come into force  —  Google and the federal government have reached …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Netflix plans to add Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy to its mobile app, the App Store, and Google Play on December 14, available to its users at no extra charge  —  The three classic titles in “Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition" will be available Dec. 14 for Netflix customers …
Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
Elon Musk dismisses fear of advertisers leaving X after his controversial posts: “If somebody's gonna try to blackmail me with advertising ... go fuck yourself”  —  - In recent weeks, Musk has promoted and sometimes verbally endorsed what the White House called “antisemitic and racist hate” …
Ann-Marie Alcántara / Wall Street Journal:
Spotify launches Spotify Wrapped 2023, adding a Me in 2023 feature that assigns users one of 12 themes to describe their listening habits, on mobile and desktop  —  The listening recap, available Wednesday, takes over social media every year  —  It's the time of year many people have been anxiously awaiting: Spotify Wrapped season.
Steven J. Horowitz / Variety:
Michael Peel / Financial Times:
Google DeepMind uses GNoME to find 2.2M crystal structures, over 45x more than all such substances ever found, and plans to make 381K available to scientists  —  Work shows power of AI to improve real-world technology in fields from renewable energy to advanced computation
Wayne Ma / The Information:
Sources: Apple licenses Arm's IP at less than 30 cents per device, the lowest rate among Arm's smartphone chip clients; Apple makes up under 5% of Arm's sales  —  In 2017, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son gathered a group of executives from Arm Holdings, the British chip designer SoftBank had just bought …
Ben Weiss / Fortune:
Wormhole, a Jump Crypto messaging protocol that lets developers communicate across blockchains, raised $225M at a $2.5B valuation, 2023's largest crypto raise  —  In a parched fundraising landscape, the team behind Wormhole, the messaging protocol that lets developers communicate across different blockchains …
Variety:
Robert De Niro criticizes Apple and the Gotham Awards, after sources say Apple cut part of his speech slamming Donald Trump, which he read anyway from his phone  —  The “Killers of the Flower Moon” actor was gearing up to slam Donald Trump at Monday's Gotham Awards, but when he took the stage …
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
Plex users express alarm after getting a “Week in Review” email that showed what they and their friends watched, part of Plex's opt-out Discover Together tool  —  “I can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff,” a user said of Plex's Week …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Amazon debuts Titan Image Generator, an AI model that creates images from text and adds an invisible watermark by default, in preview for AWS clients on Bedrock  —  Amazon is releasing an image generator — joining the ranks of the many, many other tech giants and startups that have already done so.
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Intuit Mailchimp plans to shut down TinyLetter on February 29, 2024, to focus on its core Mailchimp marketing product; Mailchimp acquired TinyLetter in 2011  —  Mailchimp is shutting TinyLetter, a service that I loved that let individuals easily write and publish simple but nice-looking email newsletters.
Bloomberg:
Sources: London-based AI startup Stability AI held early-stage talks with several companies about a sale, as executives face investor pressure over its finances  —  - Move follows letter from investor Coatue calling for changes  — Coatue concerned about Stability AI's financial position
Graham Starr / Bloomberg:
Okta tells customers that hackers who breached its network stole information on all users of its customer support system, greater than the 1% claimed previously  —  - Okta had earlier said breach affected about 1% of customers  — Company said some Okta employee information was also stolen
Eric Newcomer / Newcomer:
Together AI, which helps pre-train and fine-tune open-source foundation models more efficiently, raised a $102.5M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins  —  I spoke with Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash  —  Together AI, a startup that's helping companies pre-train and fine-tune open source foundation models …
Bloomberg:
How deepfake porn victims in NYC suburb Levittown helped convict the perpetrator, a former classmate, an ordeal further complicated by the lack of clear US laws  —  A group of young women in a New York City suburb, horrified to learn their photographs had been manipulated and posted online, took matters into their own hands.
David Pierce / The Verge:
A look at Ayaneo's $199+ Retro Mini PC AM01, designed to look like a 1980s-era Macintosh, with Ryzen chip options, up to 32GB of RAM, and up to 1TB of storage  —  Ayaneo, which is mostly known for making handheld gaming consoles, just fully revealed the new Retro Mini PC AM01 after teasing it a few weeks ago.

Sponsor Posts

Airtable:
Meet Airtable ProductCentral  —  The unified solution for managing your entire product development process in the AI era.
Tribe AI:
Build AI products that matter  —  Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact.  We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.
Zoho:
Zoho Forms for successful Black Friday sales  —  Black Friday is a retail frenzy that can significantly impact your bottom line.  To make the most of this shopping bonanza, you need a strategy that not only attracts customers …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Mon. 11/04 - Apple Buying And Investing In Things
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:45 PM ET, November 29, 2023.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Susan Heavey / Reuters:

Earlier Picks

Financial Times:
Bloomberg: