Techmeme
July 27, 2023, 10:50 PM

Top News

New York Times:
In four new studies with collaboration from Meta, researchers find Facebook's algorithm is “influential” but doesn't necessarily change beliefs, and more  —  In four new studies, researchers found complicated results from experiments on Facebook's and Instagram's algorithms …
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Wiz researchers say two vulnerabilities in the OverlayFS filesystem module in Ubuntu may allow unprivileged local users to gain elevated privileges  —  Two Linux vulnerabilities introduced recently into the Ubuntu kernel create the potential for unprivileged local users to gain elevated privileges on a massive number of devices.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Google rolls out Android unknown tracker alerts, including manual scan, and pauses a Find My Device update to locate missing items until Apple updates iOS  —  Google today will begin to roll out a new safety feature, unknown tracker alerts, first announced at its developer event Google I/O this spring.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
WhatsApp announces instant video messages, letting users send clips up to 60 seconds in a similar way to voice notes; videos automatically play on mute  —  WhatApp's latest feature is the ability to quickly send short video messages, similar to the voice messages the service already supports.
New York Times:
Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren announce the Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act, seeking an independent agency to license and police Big Tech  —  Mr. Graham, a Republican, is the senior senator from South Carolina.  Ms. Warren, a Democrat, is the senior senator from Massachusetts.
Makena Kelly / The Verge:
Washington Post:
Twitter/X reinstates the account of a right-wing influencer with over 500K followers who posted child sex abuse imagery that drew over 3M views and 8K retweets  —  It's only the latest incident of banned imagery making its way onto the site since Musk bought it  —  CORRECTION
More: Forbes and Techdirt
Bluesky: @yoyoel.com and @yoyoel.com
Forums: r/Twitter and r/news
The Verge:
Sony has sold over 40M PS5s since its launch in November 2020, up from 10M in July 2021, despite the “unprecedented challenges of COVID” and supply chain issues  —  / Despite supply chain issues and the problems caused by the pandemic, Sony says the PS5 supply is now ‘well-stocked.’
Reuters:
Source: about 10 years ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard to overstate battery range; in 2022, Tesla created a “Diversion Team” to suppress thousands of complaints  —  About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide “rosy” …
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Intel reports Q2 revenue down 15% YoY to $12.9B, Data Center and AI revenue down 15% YoY to $4B, and forecasts Q3 revenue above estimates; INTC jumps 6%+  —  - Intel reported second-quarter earnings on Thursday, including a return to profitability after two straight quarters of losses, and a stronger-than-expected forecast.
Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Sequoia cut the size of its cryptocurrency fund to $200M from $585M and of its ecosystem fund, which invests in other funds, to $450M from $900M  —  Brand has come under scrutiny following a series of controversial decisions  —  Sequoia Capital pared back the size of two major venture funds …
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
Analyses: hackers infect players of an old Call of Duty game with a worm that spreads in online lobbies; Activision turns off multiplayer for the game on Steam  —  Hackers are infecting players of an old Call of Duty game with a worm that spreads automatically in online lobbies, according to two analyses of the malware.
Kim Mackrael / Wall Street Journal:
The EU opens an antitrust investigation into whether Microsoft abuses its dominant position by bundling Teams with Office, the first investigation in 10+ years  —  Probe marks the first time in a decade that Microsoft has come under formal investigation by Brussels
Steve Moser / MacRumors:
iOS 17 beta 4 code hints at a rumored Action button, offering quick access to Shortcuts, Silent Mode, Camera, and more, similar to the Watch Ultra's button  —  Apple released the fourth beta of iOS 17 to developers yesterday, and among the changes in the latest beta are some new code snippets …
Cade Metz / New York Times:
Researchers: the guardrails on ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude can be bypassed by adding a long suffix of characters to prompts, generating false and toxic responses  —  A new report indicates that the guardrails for widely used chatbots can be thwarted, leading to an increasingly unpredictable environment for the technology.
Carly Page / TechCrunch:
Filing: US government services contractor Maximus says MOVEit hackers accessed protected health information and other data of “at least” 8M to 11M people  —  U.S. government services contracting giant Maximus has confirmed that hackers exploiting a vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer accessed …
David Pierce / The Verge:
A postmortem of Neeva, which tried to build a faster, simpler, and ad-free search engine, and how default search engine choices reinforce Google's dominance  —  A couple of ex-Googlers set out to create the search engine of the future.  They built something faster, simpler, and ad-free.

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Earlier Picks

Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
Financial Times:
Bloomberg:
Tom Warren / The Verge: