Techmeme
August 5, 2022, 2:45 PM

Top News

Brian Heater / TechCrunch:
Amazon plans to acquire Roomba maker iRobot in a $1.7B all-cash deal; Colin Angle will remain as iRobot's CEO  —  Amazon this morning announced plans to acquire Roomba maker iRobot for an all-cash deal valued at $1.7 billion.  —  “Since we started iRobot, our team has been on a mission …
Nikkei Asia:
Nikkei Asia:
The Verge:
After criticism, DuckDuckGo says its browser will now block Microsoft tracking scripts on third-party websites; Microsoft was exempt due to a search agreement  —  After an uproar over an exception, DuckDuckGo is promising transparency.  —  After a revelation in May that DuckDuckGo's (DDG) …
CoinDesk:
How crypto developer Ian Macalinao posed as 11 independent devs and created a web of DeFi protocols that temporarily inflated the total value locked on Solana  —  The Macalinao brothers used a web of bogus identities to create the illusion of a dev community, juicing value on the Saber protocol and Solana blockchain.
Nicola Kelly / The Guardian:
The UK government plans to require that migrants convicted of a crime scan their faces up to five times per day on a smartwatch; locations will be tracked 24/7  —  Home Office and MoJ plans will require migrants convicted of crimes to take photos up to five times a day
Omer Benjakob / Haaretz:
A prototype of NSO's Pegasus for Israeli police in 2014 shows the UI and features, including real-time wiretapping, reading messages, and remote camera control  —  Israel Police planned to present cabinet with the system eight years ago.  It was intended to be capable of turning the infected phone …
Nupur Anand / Reuters:
India's Enforcement Directorate freezes assets worth ~$8.16M of Binance-owned crypto exchange WazirX, citing suspected foreign exchange rule violations  —  India's financial crime-fighting agency said on Friday that it has frozen the assets of WazirX, owned by the world's largest digital …
James Vincent / The Verge:
Meta releases its BlenderBot 3 chatbot, which searches the web to answer questions, to US users on the web in order to collect feedback  —  What could possibly go wrong?  —  Meta's AI research labs have created a new state-of-the-art chatbot and are letting members of the public talk …
Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
Google updates search results for queries with quotes to show where the phrase appears in the results snippet instead of an overall description of the page  —  Google has updated how search result snippet in Google Search for queries that contain quotes.  Now, Google will show …
Joanna Ossinger / Bloomberg:
Crypto bridge Nomad says anyone returning at least 90% of stolen tokens will be viewed as a white-hat hacker and the remaining 10% will become the reward  —  Cryptocurrency company Nomad is offering a bounty to recoup funds spirited away in a $190 million hack that again highlighted security vulnerabilities in the digital-token sector.
Soma Biswas / Wall Street Journal:
A New York judge allows Voyager Digital to return $270M in customer cash deposits, settling one of the company's larger issues after filing for bankruptcy  —  Crypto broker got bankruptcy court approval to return cash deposits  —  Cryptocurrency brokerage firm Voyager Digital Holdings Inc. secured approval …
Andrew Romero / 9to5Google:
YouTube tests pinch to zoom with its Premium subscribers, letting them zoom into a video, even in landscape mode  —  YouTube has a program that allows Premium subscribers to access brand new features that aren't quite fully baked.  Today, YouTube dropped a new one called “pinch to zoom” …
Tom Warren / The Verge:

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