Techmeme
February 29, 2024, 3:15 PM

Top News

Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
Source: Embracer will sell its subsidiary Saber Interactive to private investors in a $500M deal, making Saber a privately owned company with ~3,500 staff  —  Saber will continue developing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic  —  Swedish gaming company Embracer Group AB will sell …
Consumer Reports:
Researchers find serious security flaws in cheap video door bells sold by a Chinese company under various brands names on Amazon, Shein, and other sites  —  The devices are also sold by Walmart, Sears, and other retailers—and big platforms have faced few consequences for shipping flawed products
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Microsoft launches a Copilot for Finance in public preview; the chatbot can perform some common role-specific actions in Excel and Outlook  —  - Microsoft is launching a Copilot for Finance, which it said will be able to perform a handful of common role-specific actions in Excel and Outlook.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
Microsoft outlines the new DirectSR API, which lets game developers integrate super resolution AI-upscaling features from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel  —  Microsoft has outlined a new Windows API designed to offer a seamless way for game developers to integrate super resolution AI-upscaling features from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel.
Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: the SEC is investigating whether OpenAI investors were misled, after the board claimed during Sam Altman's firing that he wasn't “consistently candid”  —  Regulator is examining internal communications of CEO Sam Altman, after board last year temporarily ousted him for alleged lack of candor
Ashley Capoot / CNBC:
Change Healthcare confirms that the ransomware group BlackCat is behind the ongoing attack that caused widespread disruptions to pharmacies across the US  —  - Change Healthcare on Thursday confirmed that the ransomware group Blackcat is behind the ongoing cybersecurity attack that's been impacting its systems since last week.
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Alibaba researchers detail EMO, or Emote Portrait Alive, an AI system that can create realistic talking and singing videos from portrait photos  —  Researchers at Alibaba's Institute for Intelligent Computing have developed a new artificial intelligence system called “EMO,” …
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
JFrog says it found around a hundred malicious ML models on Hugging Face, some of which can backdoor users' machines  —  At least 100 instances of malicious AI ML models were found on the Hugging Face platform, some of which can execute code on the victim's machine, giving attackers a persistent backdoor.
Jeanne Whalen / Washington Post:
The US launches a probe into possible security risks of Chinese-manufactured vehicles, saying modern cars are like smartphones and could be used for espionage  —  The Biden administration says software and digital connections in modern cars could be used to spy on Americans or sabotage the vehicles
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Researchers detail an ongoing repo confusion attack, which involves cloning existing repos and infecting them with malware loaders, impacting 100K+ GitHub repos  —  GitHub keeps removing malware-laced repositories, but thousands remain.  —  GitHub is struggling to contain …
New York Times:
Sources detail Apple's $10B+ car project: years of disagreements over building a self-driving car or just an EV, talks with Elon Musk on buying Tesla, and more  —  Internal disagreements over the direction of the Apple car led the effort to sputter for years before it was canceled this week.
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Humanoid robot maker Figure AI confirms it has raised $675M at a $2.6B valuation and shows off a general-purpose robot called Figure 01  —  - Figure AI raised $675 million from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft and OpenAI.  — The startup says it will use the money …
Reuters:
Coinbase says all services on its website have been restored after a “display issue” on February 28 caused some users to see a zero balance in their account  —  Coinbase Global (COIN.O) said on Wednesday that all services on its website have been restored after an issue earlier …
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Stack Overflow launches OverflowAPI to give AI companies access to its knowledge base, starting with Google, which will use the data for Gemini for Google Cloud  —  Developer Q&A site Stack Overflow is launching a new program today that will give AI companies access to its knowledge base through a new API, aptly named OverflowAPI.
Lucy Fisher / Financial Times:
The UK is piloting the use of ChatGPT and open-source AI models to analyze responses to public consultations and write draft answers to parliamentary questions  —  Initiative is part of Rishi Sunak's drive to boost Whitehall productivity through technology  —  UK ministers are piloting …

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Earlier Picks

Reuters:
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Yiwen Lu / New York Times: