Techmeme
January 24, 2023, 1:25 PM

Top News

Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:
The DOJ sues Google, joined by California and seven other US states, calling to break up its adtech business over alleged monopolization of the US ad market  —  The US Justice Department and eight states sued Alphabet Inc.'s Google, calling for the break up of the search giant's ad-technology business …
WABetaInfo:
WhatsApp releases a beta version of its native macOS app, built using Mac Catalyst, to all users via its website, following a limited TestFlight app beta  —  After releasing a very limited early-beta program of WhatsApp beta for macOS for a small number of people on TestFlight …
Tiernan Ray / ZDNet:
Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun says ChatGPT is “not particularly innovative” in its underlying techniques and other research labs are doing similar work  —  Much ink has been spilled of late about the tremendous promise of OpenAI's ChatGPT program for generating natural-language utterances in response to human prompts.
Alexander Martin / The Record:
Riot Games says it will not pay a ransom after hackers exfiltrated source code for League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, and a “legacy anticheat platform”  —  Riot Games, the video game developer and esports organizer, said on Tuesday that it had received a ransom email following a social engineering attack last week.
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
LastPass parent GoTo confirms hackers stole encrypted backups, an encryption key for some data, billing info, and more, in a breach first disclosed last year  —  GoTo (formerly LogMeIn) is warning customers that threat actors who breached its development environment in November 2022 stole …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Amazon launches RxPass, letting US Prime users pay $5 per month to get as many generic versions of medications as needed, starting with drugs for 80 ailments  —  More than two years since announcing Amazon Pharmacy to take some of the prescription drugs business away from big (and smaller) …
Jesse Hamilton / CoinDesk:
The FBI says North Korea-backed hacking groups Lazarus and APT38 are behind the June 2022 theft of ~$100M in ETH, USDT, and wBTC from Harmony's Horizon bridge  —  Lazarus Group and APT38, both associated with North Korea, are responsible for the attack in June, the agency concluded.
Joseph Menn / Washington Post:
A second Twitter whistleblower told the FTC and Congress last year that engineers can access “GodMode” and tweet from any account, supporting Mudge's complaint  —  Too many people can still access a program that lets them tweet under any account, he says in a complaint
Emily Nicolle / Bloomberg:
Binance admits to mistakenly storing collateral for some of its tokens in the same wallet as customer funds; reserves for 41 out of 94 coins are in one wallet  —  Binance Holdings Ltd., the world's largest crypto platform, acknowledged that it mistakenly keeps collateral for some of the tokens …
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
A manager at Activision Blizzard's Blizzard unit, who oversaw World of Warcraft Classic, departs after internally criticizing the company's stack ranking system  —  A manager at video game developer Blizzard Entertainment said he was ousted after refusing to give a low evaluation to an employee …
J.D. Capelouto / Semafor:
Live Nation President Joe Berchtold to Congress: during Taylor Swift's tour presale, Ticketmaster saw triple the bot traffic, which then impacted Verified Fan  —  The president of Ticketmaster's parent company explained to a U.S. Senate committee Tuesday why its site melted down in November during …
Hannah Murphy / Financial Times:
How Twitter Director of Product Management Esther Crawford has become one of the most influential leaders from the old guard in Elon Musk's “hardcore” Twitter  —  Days after Elon Musk had completed his $44bn buyout of Twitter, Esther Crawford shared a picture of herself sleeping …
Jennifer Elias / CNBC:
At a town hall, CEO Sundar Pichai asked staff to remain motivated as Google faces competition in areas like AI and indicated there would be executive bonus cuts  —  - Google CEO Sundar Pichai and executive leaders addressed employee questions at a town hall meeting on Monday after last week's job cuts.
Kevin McLaughlin / The Information:
Source: CEO Satya Nadella voiced concerns for years that Microsoft was slow to commercialize its AI research; in 2022, its researchers said rivals seemed ahead  —  For more than a decade, Microsoft Research, the company's in-house research group, has touted artificial intelligence breakthroughs …
David Pan / Bloomberg:
Sources: bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi plans to sell ~$160M of loans backed by ~68K bitcoin mining machines; some have defaulted or appear undercollateralized  —  Bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi Inc. plans to sell about $160 million of loans backed by around 68,000 Bitcoin mining machines …
Alexandra Sternlicht / Fortune:
Seven TikTok influencers with 100K+ followers say they have earned under $5 from the Pulse ad revenue sharing program for US creators, launched in October 2022  —  When TikTok approached Azure MacCannell in September she was ecstatic.  —  MacCannell had sold her Warwick …
Isaac Stanley-Becker / Washington Post:
Filing: Google plans to end a pilot program that lets political campaigns evade Gmail's spam filters and says the RNC didn't join before the 2022 US midterms  —  The technology giant introduced the exemption after the GOP blamed Gmail spam filters for the party's poor fundraising performance
New York Times:
A look at Sam Bankman-Fried's $400M investment in obscure hedge fund Modulo Capital, right before FTX collapsed; Modulo's executives had close SBF and FTX ties  —  After the collapse of FTX, prosecutors and lawyers have scrutinized its discredited founder's huge investment in Modulo Capital.

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