Techmeme
December 14, 2023, 10:55 PM

Top News

Forbes:
Google confirms that it will no longer respond to geofence warrants after making changes to the way Maps stores users' location data  —  “Geofence warrants,” which allow law enforcement to get location data across a wide area, have become commonplace in recent years.
Stacy Elliott / Decrypt:
Crypto wallet maker Ledger updates Connect Kit, saying a former employee “fell victim to a phishing attack” that let a hacker insert malicious code  —  Crypto wallet manufacturer Ledger has confirmed an exploit that led it to warn users to “stop using dapps” started because a former employee fell for a phishing scam.
Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:
Intel 5th-Gen Xeon Platinum 8592+ review: the $11,600 64-core chip outperforms AMD's 64-core EPYC Genoa in several benchmarks, particularly in AI workloads  —  The sun shines brighter for Intel. … Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products …
Gavin Bonshor / AnandTech:
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Ben Horowitz / Andreessen Horowitz:
Andreessen Horowitz says “we will, for the first time, get involved with politics by supporting candidates who align with our vision and values” for technology  —  As software has eaten the world, it has become integral to every industry and nearly every endeavor in our society.
Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review:
Google DeepMind's FunSearch model cracks the unsolved cap set problem in pure mathematics, the first time an LLM has solved a long-standing scientific puzzle  —  They had to throw away most of what it produced but there was gold among the garbage.  —  Google DeepMind has used a large language model …
Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch:
Email: Cruise lays off 900 staff, or ~24% of its workforce, targeting non-engineering jobs, as part of a plan to slash costs and attempt to revamp the company  —  Cruise, the embattled GM self-driving car subsidiary, is laying off 900 employees, or about 24% of its workforce …
Jon Porter / The Verge:
Meta launches Threads in the European Union, following the US, the UK, and 100+ other countries, and adds a way for EU users to browse Threads without a profile  —  Meta's Twitter competitor, Threads, is now available in the European Union, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
Jon Victor / The Information:
Sources: Google plans to use Gemini across nearly its entire line of products and in Pixie, an upcoming AI assistant that will be exclusive to its Pixel devices  —  For Google, it was a moment to savor its apparent triumph over the doomsayers.  —  Last week, the company released the first version …
Umar Shakir / The Verge:
Google plans to test Tracking Protection and blocking third-party cookies on January 4 for ~1% of Chrome users globally, ahead of a phased rollout in H2 2024  —  Google is about to launch its grand plan to block third-party cookies in Chrome that many websites use to track your activity across the web for profit.
Aria Alamalhodaei / TechCrunch:
Amazon validates Project Kuiper's optical inter-satellite links, which use infrared lasers to move data around 30% faster than terrestrial fiber optical cables  —  Amazon's Project Kuiper successfully validated key technology that will increase throughput and reduce latency for customers using …
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google launches a Pixel Diagnostic App and repair manuals in English in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and European countries where Pixel devices are sold  —  Besides the new Repair Mode introduced with Android 14 QPR1 and the December Feature Drop, Google is widely launching …
Guthrie Scrimgeour / Wired:
A look at Koolau Ranch, Mark Zuckerberg's 1,400-acre, $270M+ compound in Kauai, Hawaii, with a 5,000 sq. ft. underground shelter, a project shrouded in secrecy  —  Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is building a sprawling, $100 million compound in Hawaii—complete with plans for a huge underground bunker.
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Sources: LinkedIn shelves its effort, announced in 2019, to relocate its data centers out of its physical facilities and into Azure, a setback for Microsoft  —  - LinkedIn called off a plan to move technology to Microsoft Azure, a setback for its parent company, which is chasing Amazon Web Services.
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
The confusion around Dropbox's AI toggle highlights an AI trust crisis where many users don't believe OpenAI's claims that their data won't be used for training  —  Dropbox added some new AI features.  In the past couple of days these have attracted a firestorm of criticism.
Benj Edwards / Ars Technica:
Will Knight / Wired:
OpenAI details how its Superalignment research team is exploring ways to control stronger AI models like GPT-4 using weaker supervisor models like GPT-2  —  The “superalignment” team led by OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has devised a way to guide the behavior of AI models as they get ever smarter.

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Earlier Picks

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