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Techmeme
July 14, 2023, 11:55 PM
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
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Top News

Jordan Novet / CNBC:
The US Appeals Court for the Ninth Circuit denies the FTC's appeal for an injunctive relief to stop Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard from closing  —  In a victory for Microsoft, the U.S. Appeals Court for the Ninth Circuit late on Friday denied the Federal Trade Commission's appeal …
Matt Wales / Eurogamer.net:
Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb, Xbox's senior director of corporate communications, is leaving Microsoft after 22 years to “work on the next chapter of my career”  —  To “work on the next chapter of my career.”  —  Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb, long one of the most recognisable presences …
Wall Street Journal:
Source: Binance has fired over 1,000 people in recent weeks; the cuts are global, ongoing, and could result in the company losing more than a third of its staff  —  Crypto exchange reduces workforce as Justice Department investigation continues  —  Binance, the giant crypto exchange …
Hayden Field / CNBC:
Sensor Tower: from July 8 to July 11 and 12, Threads DAUs fell ~20% and time spent fell 50% to 10 minutes; Similarweb: Android DAUs fell 25%+ from July 7 to 10  —  - Facebook's Twitter-killer, Threads, has seen drops in daily active users and time spent on app since the weekend, according to SensorTower and SimilarWeb.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Meta confirms taking “additional steps” to prevent EU-based users from accessing Instagram's Threads; users report no longer being able to use Threads via a VPN  —  After multiple EU-based users complained about not being able to access Instagram's Threads app through VPN, Meta confirmed that it is blocking such efforts.
Semafor:
Sources: Elon Musk claimed his new startup xAI was worth $20B while he was trying to recruit top AI talent, including by offering equity in xAI  —  Elon Musk sought to recruit top AI talent to his new artificial intelligence company with equity in the venture he claimed was already worth tens …
Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
In a Twitter Spaces chat, Elon Musk says xAI plans to collaborate with Tesla on silicon and AI software, use public tweets for AI training, and more  —  - During a live audio session on Twitter, owner and chairman Elon Musk said his new AI startup, xAI, will use Twitter data for training the …
Matt Binder / Mashable:
Some Reddit users report disappearance of their private messages from before 2023; Reddit says the move was announced on June 22 and is effective since June 30  —  Many Redditors were caught off guard by the removal of their chat and message history.  —  The Reddit blackout protests …
Matt Levine / Bloomberg:
The Ripple ruling implies securities laws protect only sophisticated investors, the opposite of the US stock market's rule, and seems likely to work out poorly  —  Crypto tokens are securities unless you are anonymously dumping them on retail investors.
Aoyon Ashraf / CoinDesk:
After the US court ruling in Ripple's favor, Coinbase, Kraken, and Bitstamp resume XRP trading on their US exchanges and Gemini is exploring listing the token
Tom Hals / Reuters:
A US judge says Ripple's XRP sales to sophisticated investors violated securities law but that sales on exchanges were not offers of securities
Tim Copeland / The Block:
Crypto bridging protocol Multichain ceases operations after confirming Chinese police detained its CEO, Zhaojun, and his sister, who held ~$220M of user assets  —  - Multichain confirmed its CEO has been detained in China.  — It said the CEO's sister moved $220 million of funds …
Salvador Rodriguez / Wall Street Journal:
Meta insiders detail a return to “OG Mark” and how staff secretly toiled away to determine how to create a Twitter-like service that fit with the company's apps  —  Staffers toiled for months to create a Twitter-like service that would fit with existing apps
Kaya Yurieff / The Information:
Creator monetization platform Fanhouse agrees to be acquired by Passes, a rival platform that only launched in beta in December 2022 and raised a $9M seed  —  A startup that rode the pandemic-era frenzy around OnlyFans is selling to a rival.  Fanhouse, which operates a website …
Michael Schulman / New Yorker:
Netflix's Orange Is the New Black was an early indicator of how lopsided the streaming economy would be, as 10 actors from the show detail tiny residual incomes  —  The innovative and daring show was a worldwide hit for Netflix, but some of the actors say that they were never fairly compensated.
Andrew Webster / The Verge:
SAG-AFTRA: the AMPTP's AI proposal lets studios scan a background actor to create a digital likeness, for a day's pay, for perpetual use without consent or pay

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:55 PM ET, July 14, 2023.

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From Mediagazer

Max Tani / Semafor:
Sources: in May 2024, Business Insider sent some staff a recommended reading list that included seemingly AI-generated books that did not appear to exist

Todd Spangler / Variety:
Sources: Disney is laying off several hundred employees globally across multiple teams, including TV and film

Naman Ramachandran / Variety:
Marc Maron plans to end WTF With Marc Maron podcast in the fall; the groundbreaking podcast helped define the medium with 1,600+ episodes after its 2009 launch

More News

Brendan Pierson / Reuters:
A US appeals court temporarily blocks a lower court order that sharply limited US government officials' and agencies' contacts with social media companies
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Twitter aims to reduce DM spam with a setting that moves messages from Blue users you don't follow back to the Message Request inbox instead of the main inbox
More: Techlusive, Dexerto, and Engadget
Bluesky: @jww.wtf and @setia.ink.  Twitter: @twittersupport.  Threads: @carnage4life.  Forums: r/RealTesla
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Meta unveils CM3leon, an image generation transformer model requiring five times less compute and a smaller training dataset than past transformer-based methods

Earlier Picks

Reuters:
Sources and a doc: India told streaming services like Netflix and Disney to use an independent panel to review content for obscenity and violence before release
Reuters:
Twitter sues four unnamed entities in Texas for “unlawfully scraping data” and seeks $1M+ in relief; Elon Musk: “that is why we had to put rate limits in place”
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Microsoft names Aptos as the next default font for its Microsoft 365 productivity apps, replacing Calibri; Aptos was available for two years as Bierstadt
Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch:
Twitter starts paying Twitter Blue creators who earned 5M+ impressions per month for three months a revenue cut from the ads beside the replies to their tweets
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