Techmeme
January 26, 2024, 4:05 AM

Top News

Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Apple announces support for alternative app stores in the EU, charging no commission but instead an annual €0.50 Core Technology Fee per install per account  —  Apple today announced major changes to its app ecosystem in the European Union, implementing updates that will allow iPhone …
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says Apple's “anticompetitive scheme rife with new junk fees” is illegal under the EU's DMA and an example of “malicious compliance”  —  Apple announced a slew of App Store policy changes today to conform to the EU's Digital Market Act …
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Epic Games plans to launch its Epic Games Store on the iPhone in the EU in 2024, which will include its popular game Fortnite  —  Epic Games plans to bring its Epic Games Store to the iPhone and the iPad under Apple's new alternative app store policy in the European Union, Epic Games announced today.
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
The Verge:
Andrew Webster / The Verge:
Apple begins allowing game streaming apps and services globally, meaning that Xbox Cloud Gaming, GeForce Now, and others can be turned into full-featured apps  —  Starting today Apple is opening up its App Store to allow game streaming apps and services.  This means that services …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Internal memo: Microsoft plans to lay off ~1,900 staff at Activision Blizzard and Xbox, or ~8% of its Microsoft Gaming workforce, this week  —  Microsoft is laying off around 1,900 employees at Activision Blizzard and Xbox this week.  While Microsoft is primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard …
Charlie Savage / New York Times:
An NSA letter to Sen. Ron Wyden reveals the agency buys logs related to Americans' domestic internet activities from commercial data brokers without warrants  —  The disclosure comes amid congressional scrutiny and a Federal Trade Commission crackdown on commercial data brokers.
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac:
Apple plans to allow default third-party browsers, like Chrome, Edge, and Brave, and web engines in the EU with iOS 17.4, prompting Safari users on first launch  —  Apple is making major changes to how web browsers can operate on iPhone for customers in the EU. iOS 17.4 will introduce …
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Thomas Germain / Gizmodo:
Mysk: iPhone apps including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and X are skirting Apple's privacy rules to collect user data through push notifications  —  Security researchers say apps including Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, and countless other use notifications as a loophole to skirt privacy protections.
David McCabe / New York Times:
The US FTC opens a probe into investments by Microsoft in OpenAI and by Amazon and Google in Anthropic, to assess how the deals alter the competitive landscape  —  The agency plans to scrutinize Microsoft, Amazon and Google for their investments in the A.I. start-ups OpenAI and Anthropic.
Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
OpenAI announces 25% to 50% lower GPT-3.5 Turbo prices, a GPT-4 Turbo preview model to reduce cases of “laziness”, improved text embedding models, and more  —  OpenAI is always making slight adjustments to its models and pricing, and today brings just such an occasion.
Winston Cho / The Hollywood Reporter:
The George Carlin estate sues Dudesy, which released a comedy special featuring an AI-generated recreation of George Carlin, alleging copyright infringement  —  “We have to draw a line in the sand,” says daughter Kelly Carlin, who sued creators of an hourlong special titled 'George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead.'
New York Times:
A Cruise report finds its top executives' adversarial approach toward regulators led to a cascade of events that ended with a suspension of its autonomous fleet  —  A law firm's review found that executives had failed to fully explain an October crash, which the Justice Department is also investigating.
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Intel reports Q4 revenue up 10% YoY to $15.4B vs. $15.15B est., Data Center and AI down 10% YoY to $4B, and Q1 revenue guidance below estimates; INTC drops 10%+  —  - Intel issued an outlook for the first quarter of 2024 that lagged analyst estimates.  — Intel shares are down slightly …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
X is flooded with AI-generated pornographic images of Taylor Swift; one post, live for 17 hours, had 45M+ views, hundreds of thousands of likes, and 24K reposts  —  Sexually explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift have been circulating on X (formerly Twitter) over the last day in the latest example …
Stuart A. Thompson / New York Times:
LA County agrees to pay $5M to election software maker Konnech CEO Eugene Yu, who was wrongly arrested and charged in 2022 with mishandling voter data  —  Eugene Yu, the owner of an election software company, was arrested in 2022 on charges of breaching election data.  Those charges were dropped weeks later.
Kyle Bradshaw / 9to5Google:
Google's web-based app development suite Project IDX adds an Android emulator, an iOS simulator, new project templates, and more  —  Project IDX, Google's all-in-one web-based, AI-enhanced app development suite, is delivering on some of its early promises.  Among other improvements …
Jennifer Creery / Bloomberg:
Taiwan plans to spend ~$7.4M on the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine, or Taide, an LLM for businesses, banks, and other customers, to counter China's influence  —  - Island developing secure tool for companies, lenders to use  — Taiwan has been striving to move up AI development chain
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple adds support for transcripts to the Podcasts app in iOS 17.4 beta and says transcripts will be generated automatically after an episode is published  —  Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 17.4 today, and there are a couple of changes to the Apple Podcasts app.

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Earlier Picks

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Benj Edwards / Ars Technica:
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