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Techmeme
February 29, 2024, 9:05 PM
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Top News

Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
Source: Embracer plans to 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 …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Microsoft launches Copilot for Finance in public preview, helping users reconcile data in Excel, speed up the collections process in Outlook, and more  —  - 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.
Consumer Reports:
Researchers find serious security flaws in cheap video doorbells sold by Chinese company Aiwit under various brand names on Amazon, Shein, Temu, 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
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Alibaba researchers detail EMO, or Emote Portrait Alive, an AI system that creates a realistic talking or singing video from a portrait photo and an audio file  —  Researchers at Alibaba's Institute for Intelligent Computing have developed a new artificial intelligence system called “EMO,” …
Ashley Capoot / CNBC:
Change Healthcare confirms that the ransomware group BlackCat is behind the ongoing attack that has 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.
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.
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.
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Brave launches its AI-powered assistant Leo, which can create real-time summaries of webpages or videos, generate long form content, and more, on Android  —  Brave is launching its AI-powered assistant, Leo, to all Android users.  The assistant allows users to ask questions, translate pages, summarize pages, create content and more.
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google adds Photomath, which lets users solve math problems by taking a photo, to its Play Store and App Store publisher accounts, after buying the app in 2022  —  In May of 2022, Google announced that it was acquiring a math solver app called Photomath.  The deal closed last year …
Davey Winder / Forbes:
Russian-speaking LockBit threatens to release Trump case documents in Fulton County Court that “could affect the upcoming US election” unless a ransom is paid  —  The LockBit ransomware group is threatening to release Fulton County Court documents related to Donald Trump's case unless …
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Robotics startup Figure AI confirms raising $675M at a $2.6B valuation and is partnering with OpenAI to “develop next-generation AI models for humanoid robots”  —  - Figure AI raised $675 million from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft and OpenAI.
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
Larry Dignan / Constellation Research:
Dell reports Q4 revenue down 11% YoY to $22.3B vs. $22.2B est., Client revenue down 12% to $11.7B, and Infrastructure revenue down 6% to $9.3B; DELL jumps 15%+  —  Dell Technologies reported a better-than-expected fourth quarter as the company saw strong demand for AI-optimized servers.
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
Paul Vieira / Wall Street Journal:
Canada's antitrust watchdog expands its four-year probe into Google's online ad practices, with a focus on whether the company engages in predatory pricing  —  The Competition Burea is investigating whether the search giant engages in predatory pricing  —  OTTAWA—Canada's antitrust watchdog …
Morgan Sung / Rest of World:
As Twitch shuts down in South Korea citing high costs due to new “sender pays” network rules, livestreamers struggle to use Korean rivals like AfreecaTV  —  The streaming giant attributed its departure to high network fees.  — On February 27, Twitch officially shut down business in South Korea.

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UiPath:
UiPath Unveils 10 Innovations that Will Shape the Agentic Future  —  Orchestration engine, API workflows and agentic testing among key features of new UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation, launched at UiPath DevCon 2025
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From Mediagazer

Sara Fischer / Axios:
PBS and a public TV affiliate in Minnesota sue the Trump administration, saying his executive order to cut federal funding violated PBS' First Amendment rights

Ally Jarmanning / New Hampshire Public Radio:
The founder of an addiction treatment network is charged with orchestrating vandalism at NHPR journalists' homes after a report into his alleged sexual abuse

Brian Stelter / CNN:
OAN chief Pentagon correspondent Gabrielle Cuccia says she was fired after criticizing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's media restrictions at the Pentagon

More News

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

Earlier Picks

Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Eight EU consumer rights groups lodge GDPR complaints with national data protection authorities, accusing Meta of coercing users with its “pay-or-consent” model
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
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
Leo Schwartz / Fortune:
Gemini agrees to return the $1B+ owed to customers and pay a $37M fine in a settlement with the New York Department of Financial Services related to Gemini Earn
Alex Koller / CNBC:
EA plans to cut 5% of its workforce, part of a plan that includes reducing office space and sunsetting some games; EA employed 13,400 workers as of March 2023
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