Techmeme
February 29, 2024, 9:05 PM

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.

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 SalesIQ turns 10: Transforming customer experiences since 2014  —  October marked a remarkable milestone for Zoho SalesIQ—our 10th anniversary.  What began in 2014 as a simple live chat tool has evolved …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Fri. 11/01 - ChatGPT Search
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 9:05 PM ET, February 29, 2024.

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

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

Earlier Picks

Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Reuters:
Leo Schwartz / Fortune:
Alex Koller / CNBC: