Techmeme
February 21, 2023, 10:50 PM

Top News

Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft is bringing its Xbox PC games to Nvidia's GeForce Now and promises to offer Activision Blizzard games on the cloud service if the acquisition closes  —  Microsoft is bringing its Xbox PC games to Nvidia's GeForce Now cloud gaming service.  Speaking at a press conference in Brussels today …
Taylor Soper / GeekWire:
Microsoft President Brad Smith says the company signed a binding, 10-year contract to bring Call of Duty games to Nintendo consoles on the same day as Xbox  —  Microsoft's deal with Nintendo to bring “Call of Duty” games to Nintendo systems — if Microsoft's proposed $68.7 billion acquisition …
Greg Bensinger / Reuters:
Over 200 e-books in Amazon's Kindle Store listed ChatGPT as an author as of mid-February 2023, as some worry that generative AI could commoditize book writing  —  Until recently, Brett Schickler never imagined he could be a published author, though he had dreamed about it.
Michael Kan / PCMag:
Sci-fi outlet Clarkesworld suspends short story submissions, citing a surge in AI-generated stories from people who only care about “making a quick buck”  —  Clarkesworld speculates that people are using AI to make ‘a quick buck’ since the sci-fi publication pays 12 cents a word for accepted stories.
Washington Post:
A recap of oral arguments before SCOTUS in Gonzalez v. Google, where justices appeared to struggle to define where Section 230's legal shield should end  —  The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard oral arguments in Gonzalez v. Google, a lawsuit that could shift the foundations of internet law.
Eric Goldman / Technology & Marketing Law Blog:
Takeaways from the Gonzalez v. Google oral arguments: the justices did not engage much with Gonzalez's weak core arguments after their initial dismantling  —  I'm going to crank this blog post out before I get swamped with press requests.  My takeaways:  — I did not hear 5 votes in favor of the plaintiffs' position.
More: The Register, BBC, CNBC, and Gizmodo
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Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Microsoft now allows six Bing Chat turns per session and 60 chats per day and plans to test chat tones for switching between focused and creative responses  —  Microsoft will start testing Bing Chat tones, enabling users to switch between receiving answers that are either more creative or more focused on their queries.
Gary Marcus / The Road to AI We Can Trust:
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Meta's Quest v50 update adds an experimental setting called Direct Touch, which enables hand tracking for touching virtual buttons and keyboards  —  Hand tracking on Meta's Quest VR headsets is about to get better.  With the new v50 update, you'll be able to “touch” things like menu buttons …
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Sources: Twitter laid off dozens of sales and engineering staff last week, as Musk gave a one-week deadline to make its ad targeting work like Google search ads  —  He keeps laying people off anyway.  —  Dozens of Twitter employees across sales and engineering departments were laid off last week …
Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
Amazon expands its partnership with OpenAI-rival Hugging Face, which plans to build its next-gen LLM on AWS and have Amazon offer its tools to AWS customers  —  Amazon.com Inc.'s cloud unit is expanding a partnership with artificial intelligence startup Hugging Face Inc. …
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
A researcher found a now-secure US DOD Azure database without a password for two weeks that had years' worth of military emails with sensitive personnel info  —  A government cloud email server was connected to the internet without a password  —  The U.S. Department of Defense secured …
Andrew Chung / Reuters:
SCOTUS declines to hear Wikimedia's challenge to the NSA's warrantless online surveillance program, leaving in place a lower court's 2015 dismissal  —  The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a bid by the operator of the popular Wikipedia internet encyclopedia to resurrect its lawsuit …
Karl Evers-Hillstrom / The Hill:
Medical device company AliveCor, which accused Apple of patent infringement, claims Biden upheld an ITC ruling that could result in an Apple Watch import ban  —  President Biden has upheld an International Trade Commission (ITC) ruling that could result in an import ban on the Apple Watch …
Patrick McGee / Financial Times:
A look at Apple's smartphone dominance among Gen Z in the US, who make up an estimated 34% of US iPhone owners, as Samsung and Android struggle against iMessage  —  Younger Americans prefer an iPhone over Android by huge margins, creating unusual pressure over how they communicate
Louis Rosenberg / VentureBeat:
Berkeley study: researchers identified VR users with 94%+ accuracy using 100 seconds of motion data, after analyzing anonymized data of 50K+ Beat Saber players  —  Louis Rosenberg, Unanimous A.I.  —  A new paper from the University of California Berkeley reveals that privacy may be impossible …

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More News

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Earlier Picks

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Jonathan M. Gitlin / Ars Technica:
Jordan Robertson / Bloomberg: