Techmeme
March 13, 2024, 11:40 AM

Top News

Washington Post:
The US House passes a bipartisan TikTok bill that forces a sale or ban of the app; the legislation faces an uncertain Senate path without a companion measure  —  The House vote, set for Wednesday, is expected to mark the first time a chamber of Congress has passed legislation that could lead to a ban of a social media platform.
More: The Verge, Axios, New York Times, Ars Technica, Washington Post, 9to5Mac, Agence France-Presse, The Information, The Irish Times, USA Today, The Hill, Gizmodo, Engadget, Associated Press, TechCrunch, South China Morning Post, Wall Street Journal, The Independent, Reuters, Bloomberg, Associated Press, NPR, Bloomberg, Neowin, Washington Post, Kansas City Star, The Mirror, BNN Bloomberg, Benzinga, HuffPost, Comic Book, Yahoo News, CBS News, Rolling Stone, Variety, CNBC, NBC News, Financial Times, Washington Post, Business Insider, New York Post, Deadline, Business Times, GB News, Newsweek, UNILAD, Courthouse News Service, News18, ABC News, Wccftech, Senator Rubio, Tech Startups, The Daily Caller, Polygon, lawsociety.ie, Boston Herald, CNN, UPI, The National, CMU, Sky News, Fox Business, Wired, The Daily Signal, The News Lens International …, The Daily Beast, CBC News, Nikkei Asia, Asia Financial, WMFE, Scrippsnews.com, Hindustan Times, Social Media Today, Just The News, NTD, The Gazette, Washington Times, and Washington Post
Wall Street Journal:
As TikTok faces a divestment bill in the US, a look at how lawmakers and the Biden administration quietly planned the legislation and caught TikTok by surprise  —  Executives of the video-messaging app thought they had fended off attacks.  Behind the scenes, lawmakers and Biden officials were working to force its ban or sale.
CNBC:
The EU Parliament approves the AI Act, voting 523 in favor and 46 against, despite competition fears; the Act, born in 2021, puts AI tech into risk categories  —  - The European Union Parliament on Wednesday approved the world's first major set of regulatory ground rules to govern …
Washington Post:
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Spotify rolls out music videos on mobile and desktop in beta in 11 markets, including Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, and the UK, for Premium subscribers  —  Spotify is adding music videos to its mobile and desktop apps in some markets.  They are tightly integrated with the company's music library …
Emilia David / The Verge:
Google DeepMind details SIMA, an AI agent training to learn gaming skills to play like a human; SIMA trained on No Man's Sky, Goat Simulator 3, and other games  —  Google DeepMind unveiled SIMA, an AI agent training to learn gaming skills so it plays more like a human instead of an overpowered AI that does its own thing.
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Google paid out $10M to 632 bug bounty researchers in 2023 via its Vulnerability Reward Program, including $3.4M for Android bugs; the highest bounty was $113K  —  Google awarded $10 million to 632 researchers from 68 countries in 2023 for finding and responsibly reporting security flaws in the company's products and services.
Chris Eggertsen / Billboard:
Neil Young brings his music back to Spotify after requesting its removal in January 2022, saying “Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation”  —  The singer-songwriter previously had his music removed from the platform over what he deemed the spread of vaccine misinformation on the Joe Rogan Experience.
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
A US jury convicts Russian-Swedish national Roman Sterlingov for operating crypto “tumbler” Bitcoin Fog between 2011 and 2021, laundering 1.2M+ BTC worth ~$400M  —  Russian-Swedish national Roman Sterlingov was convicted by a federal jury in Washington, D.C., for operating Bitcoin Fog between 2011 and 2021.
Timmy Shen / The Block:
US Copyright Office and USPTO study: existing IP laws are sufficient to address NFT copyright infringement concerns and changes are not currently necessary  —  - The intellectual property authorities in the U.S. noted in an NFT study that the current laws are sufficient to address infringement concerns.
Olga Kharif / Bloomberg:
Ethereum completes its Dencun upgrade, which lowers expenses on Layer 2 networks by storing data in “blobs”; a transaction that once cost $1 can now cost a cent  —  - Software upgrade reduces costs for so-called Layer 2 chains  — Upgrade expected to spur on development of new apps and chains
Tiernan Ray / ZDNet:
Cerebras announces the WSE-3, a TSMC-made 5nm chip almost the size of a 12-inch wafer with 4T transistors, up from 2.6T in the WSE-2, for training AI models  —  The race for ever-larger generative artificial intelligence models continues to fuel the chip industry.
Patricia Hernandez / Polygon:
How MrBeast dominates this ostentatious YouTube era, using a fast, frantic, and omnipresent editing style, as his videos slowly evolve to focus on storytelling  —  Jimmy Donaldson warped YouTube in his image — but YouTube is warping him back  —  In the fall of 2023, a clip ripped from a video …
Mayank Parmar / BleepingComputer:
Brave says that daily Brave iOS app installs jumped from ~8K to over 11K after Apple added a default browser choice screen in the EU to comply with the DMA  —  Brave has seen a sharp increase in users installing its privacy-focused Brave Browser on iPhones after Apple introduced changes …
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
How Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who returned in 2015 during a leadership crisis, grew the website from $12M in annual revenue to $800M+ and from 80 staff to 2,000  —  The site, a throwback to an earlier era of social media, is poised to go public as soon as next week.  It hasn't been easy to reach this point.
George Hammond / Financial Times:
Memo: John Collison says Stripe is in “no rush” to go public and its payment volume rose 25% YoY to $1T in 2023; source: Stripe hit ~$1B in Q3 2023 net revenue  —  Payments company has become a Silicon Valley bellwether as its valuation has risen and fallen over the past few years
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Bluesky open sources its collaborative moderation tool Ozone and plans to let users run their own independent moderation services later this week  —  Decentralized Twitter/X rival Bluesky announced today that it's open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets individuals and teams collaboratively review and label content on the network.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
RevenueCat survey of nearly 30K mobile subscription apps finds that only 17.2% of them will reach $1,000 in monthly revenue and only 3.5% will reach $10,000  —  Investors know that most startups fail, but something that may be less understood is how few mobile apps actually make money.

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