Techmeme
June 23, 2022, 12:55 PM

Top News

Jeffrey Dastin / Reuters:
Amazon is working on letting Alexa mimic any voice after hearing less than a minute of audio, as a way to “make the memories last” of deceased family members  —  Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) wants to give customers the chance to make Alexa, the company's voice assistant, sound just like their grandmother — or anyone else.
Maddie Ellis / Wall Street Journal:
Instagram begins testing tools to verify ages, starting with 17 or under, using either Yoti's facial analysis tech, photo IDs, or adults vouching for users  —  Meta's new policy will make it tougher for teens to update to adult accounts.  But they can still lie about their age in the first place
New York Times:
Sources: the metaverse, not securing elections, is now Mark Zuckerberg's top priority; Meta has ~60 people focused on elections, down from 300 in 2020  —  Mark Zuckerberg, who once said securing elections was “the most important thing,” has shifted Meta's focus to the metaverse.
Wall Street Journal:
Bloomberg:
A profile of Changpeng Zhao, who built Binance into the largest crypto exchange, as he navigates a regulatory crackdown in a brutal crypto winter  —  During the first few months of this year—back when buying digital tokens named after dog memes was still seen, at least in some of the most …
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Google details the commercial Hermit spyware, used in Kazakhstan and Italy, targeting Android and iOS; the iOS version contained two new zero-days  —  The spyware has targeted victims in Kazakhstan and Italy  —  Security researchers at Lookout recently tied a previously unattributed Android mobile spyware …
Sander Lutz / Decrypt:
Coinbase plans to shut down its standalone, trader-focused Pro service by the end of 2022 and replace it with Advanced Trade across its main app and website  —  The standalone service will be replaced by Advanced Trade, a feature within the main Coinbase app.
Financial Times:
Singapore's fintech policy chief says the country will be “brutal and unrelentingly hard” on “any market bad behaviour” in the crypto industry  —  Stance marks shift in rhetoric from city-state that had courted digital currency companies
Cristiano Lima / Washington Post:
Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell says she does not support the bipartisan privacy bill, a significant blow to long-stalled federal protections for user data  —  Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell said she's not close to supporting a major proposal, dealing a significant blow to efforts to revive the long-stalled bill
Nilesh Christopher / Rest of World:
A hacktivist claims DALL-E-like Craiyon, formerly DALL-E mini, generated portraits of brown-skinned women in saris almost every time he ran a blank request  —  The images represent a glitch in the system that even its creator can't explain.  —  Like most people who are extremely online …
Francisco Pires / Tom's Hardware:
Cerebras says its “wafer-scale” chip set a record for the largest natural language processing AI model trained on a single device, at up to 20B parameters  —  Democratizing large AI Models without HPC scaling requirements.  —  Cerebras, the company behind the world's largest accelerator chip …
Washington Post:
The Senate's $52B US chip production bill, passed in June 2021, has been bogged down over unrelated disputes, like climate provisions, delaying the funds  —  Proponents are racing to salvage a bipartisan measure that would provide $52 billion for domestic chip production
Bloomberg:
Seeking to regain relevance, screenshots show Clubhouse is testing private rooms, internally called Houses, to encourage friendlier social interactions  —  Clubhouse, the voice chat app that captured the attention of Hollywood and Silicon Valley early in the pandemic, is experimenting …
Maria Deutscher / SiliconANGLE:
Evinced, which helps companies build accessible websites and apps, raised a $38M Series B led by Insight Partners, with Microsoft's M12 and others participating  —  Startup Evinced Inc., which helps companies build accessible websites and mobile apps, has raised a $38 million funding round led by Insight Partners.
More: TechCrunch
Mitchell Clark / The Verge:
Meta rebrands Facebook Pay as Meta Pay; Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is working on an interoperable “wallet for the metaverse” that will have “proof of ownership”  —  Also, the Meta Pay rebrand is here  —  Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday that Facebook Pay …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Boston-based JobGet, a job marketplace for recruiters and hourly workers, raised a $52M Series B, comprising $40M in equity and $12M in debt  —  LinkedIn, now with more than 830 million users, has carved out a place for itself as a hub for the world of professional workers …
More: JobGet

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