Techmeme
November 2, 2022, 9:30 AM

Top News

Elon Musk / @elonmusk:
Elon Musk says the blue checkmark system is “bullshit” and Twitter Blue will be $8/month with half the ads, priority in replies, mentions, and search, and more  —  Twitter's current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn't have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
More: Platformer, Ars Technica, Decrypt, Silicon Republic, Engadget, Insider, Livemint, The Verge, DC's Newsletter, Inc42 Media, Memeburn, TechSpot, Cryptopolitan, Android Headlines, CoinGape, MediaNama, Gizchina, Wccftech, Mashable, Firstpost Tech, iThinkDifferent, TheGamer, Fossbytes, Coinspeaker, Bloomberg, Neowin, Newser, BGR India, SiliconANGLE, Tech.co, XDA Developers, Digital Trends, Slate, The Economic Times, CNBC, and Digital Liturgies
New York Times:
Twitter's Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette “resigns”; sources say ad company IPG recommended that clients pause Twitter spending over moderation concerns  —  At least three Twitter executives have left in recent days, as one of the world's largest ad companies said clients …
Kali Hays / Insider:
Comedian and verified Twitter user Tim Heidecker puts the site's moderation practices to the test by starting #TrumpIsDead, which began trending on November 1  —  - A comedian intentionally started the claim, in what could be a test for Elon Musk.  — The claim was trending on Twitter.
Washington Post:
Internal email: Twitter appears to be rushing out a “high”-risk “Paywalled Video” feature, letting users charge to view their videos, with Twitter taking a cut  —  The tool would let video creators charge users for access.  The team working on it flagged big potential pitfalls.
Naomi Nix / Washington Post:
Elon Musk says Twitter will not reinstate banned accounts “until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks”  —  The pledge means that accounts including former president Donald Trump won't be allowed back online before the midterms
Chelsey Cox / CNBC:
FinCEN: US financial firms processed ~$1.2B in likely ransomware payments in 2021, up almost 3x YoY; ~75% of H2 2021 ransomware incidents were linked to Russia  —  - U.S. banks and financial institutions processed more than $1 billion in potential ransomware-related payments in 2021.
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Dropbox says hackers stole code and some API keys from 130 GitHub repositories via a phishing campaign, but its core apps and infrastructure were unaffected  —  Dropbox disclosed a security breach after threat actors stole 130 code repositories after gaining access to one of its GitHub …
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Apple TV 4K (2022) review: affordable, snappy performance, and USB-C remote, but no AirTag-like remote tracking, lackluster live TV, and somewhat stale design  —  Packing more speed than ever (and now HDR10 Plus) at a cheaper price, the Apple TV 4K is the best overall streamer on the market — even if tvOS is falling behind in places
Karen Hao / Wall Street Journal:
China's Zhengzhou industrial park, where Foxconn makes iPhones, begins a weeklong lockdown to counteract the “severe and complicated” spread of COVID-19  —  HONG KONG—The industrial park where Foxconn Technology Group's iPhone assembly plant is struggling to maintain production amid …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Sony plans to launch the PlayStation VR2 on February 22 for $550, £530, or €600; preorders open November 15  —  Sony will launch its PS VR2 headset on February 22nd priced at $549.99.  The PS VR2 will be priced at $549.99 in the US, €599.99 across Europe, £529.99, and ¥74,980 in Japan.
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
Tumblr updates its community guidelines to allow nudity, mature subject matter, and sexual themes, but says sexually explicit acts “remain off-limits”  —  Tumblr has made an update it hinted at in September, changing its rules to allow nudity — but not sexually explicit images — on the platform.
Washington Post:
Sources: the US is exploring whether it has legal authority to review Elon Musk's Twitter deal, which gives large foreign investors access to confidential data  —  Terms of the deal give large foreign investors access to confidential information about the social media platform
Ewen Callaway / Nature:
Meta researchers create ESMFold, an LLM to predict the structures of 617M+ metagenomic proteins that is less accurate than DeepMind's AlphaFold but ~60x faster  —  When London-based Deep Mind unveiled predicted structures for some 220 million proteins this year, it covered nearly every protein from known organisms in DNA databases.
Raksha Kumar / Rest of World:
A look at the everyday sexism faced by Indian women working in tech; around 36% of India's 5M tech workers are women, of which 7% hold executive-level positions  —  Tech helped more Indian women join the workforce, but they're still fighting to be treated equally.
William Turvill / Press Gazette:
Source: Meta plans to end human curation of its UK Facebook News tab, contracted to a team of ~15 journalists at Upday, and switch to an AI system in early 2023  —  Meta plans to end human curation of the UK Facebook News tab, turning it into a fully automated product, Press Gazette has learned.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Redwood City-based Alation, which helps crawl and search enterprise databases, raised a $123M Series E at a $1.7B valuation, bringing its total funding to $340M  —  There's been an explosion of enterprise data in recent years, accelerated by pandemic-spurred digital transformations.

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