Techmeme
March 13, 2024, 1:15 PM

Top News

CNBC:
The EU Parliament approves the AI Act, voting 523 in favor and 46 against, despite competition fears; the Act, born in 2021, puts AI tech into risk categories  —  - The European Union Parliament on Wednesday approved the world's first major set of regulatory ground rules to govern …
Cristiano Lima-Strong / Washington Post:
The US House passes a bipartisan TikTok bill that forces a sale or ban of the app; the legislation faces an uncertain Senate path without a companion measure  —  The swift rebuke shifts attention to the Senate, where the bill faces significant political barriers and constitutional concerns
More: The Verge, CNBC, New York Times, The Guardian, Axios, Washington Post, Ars Technica, Reuters, MacRumors, PCMag, The Hill, International Business Times, Engadget, DatacenterDynamics, 9to5Mac, Agence France-Presse, The Information, USA Today, The Hill, Axios, TechCrunch, The Independent, Wall Street Journal, Variety, NBC News, NPR, MobileSyrup, New York Times, Kansas City Star, CBS News, Irish Examiner, PhoneArena, Android Central, Roll Call, TMZ.com, Forbes, MLive.com, Politico, The Wrap, Washington Times, Wired, Across Pennsylvania, PA Patch, The Daily Caller, Android Headlines, News.ng, CNN, Times of India, Proactive, ABC News, Neowin, BGR, Washington Post, The Independent, Daily Post Nigeria, Across Illinois, IL Patch, Syracuse Post-Standard, Hypebeast, GSMArena.com, The Source, RTHK, Telegraph India, Yahoo News, Newser, BroBible, PetaPixel, KYMA-TV, Media Play News, Iowa Capital Dispatch, Rolling Stone, Fox Business, NBC News, Financial Times, Washington Post, Business Insider, New York Post, Business Times, GB News, UNILAD, Courthouse News Service, Tech Startups, Boston Herald, lawsociety.ie, Polygon, UPI, Fast Company, Sky News, Daily Mail, and The Daily Signal
Emilia David / The Verge:
Google DeepMind details SIMA, an AI agent training to learn gaming skills to play like a human; SIMA trained on No Man's Sky, Goat Simulator 3, and other games  —  Google DeepMind unveiled SIMA, an AI agent training to learn gaming skills so it plays more like a human instead of an overpowered AI that does its own thing.
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Spotify rolls out music videos on mobile and desktop in beta in 11 markets, including Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, and the UK, for Premium subscribers  —  Spotify is adding music videos to its mobile and desktop apps in some markets.  They are tightly integrated with the company's music library …
Ali Winston / Wired:
An analysis of 3M+ Discord and Telegram chats in 50+ groups finds a global network of thousands of violent predators who target, groom, and extort kids online  —  A global network of violent predators is hiding in plain sight, targeting children on major platforms, grooming them, and extorting them to commit horrific acts of abuse.
Washington Post:
Joanna Stern / Wall Street Journal:
An interview with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati on Sora, set for release later in 2024, its training data, red-teaming Sora, working with the film industry, and more  —  In an exclusive interview with our columnist, CTO Mira Murati explains the company's new Sora AI video tool and how it plans to roll it out
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Microsoft announces Microsoft Copilot for Security will be generally available on April 1, payable via a new Security Compute Unit that costs $4 per hour  —  - The Microsoft Copilot for Security will cost $4 per “security compute unit” when it becomes available in April.
Olga Kharif / Bloomberg:
Ethereum completes its Dencun upgrade, which lowers expenses on Layer 2 networks by storing data in “blobs”; a transaction that once cost $1 can now cost a cent  —  - Software upgrade reduces costs for so-called Layer 2 chains  — Upgrade expected to spur on development of new apps and chains
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Google paid out $10M to 632 bug bounty researchers in 2023 via its Vulnerability Reward Program, including $3.4M for Android bugs; the highest bounty was $113K  —  Google awarded $10 million to 632 researchers from 68 countries in 2023 for finding and responsibly reporting security flaws in the company's products and services.
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
A US jury convicts Russian-Swedish national Roman Sterlingov for operating crypto “tumbler” Bitcoin Fog between 2011 and 2021, laundering 1.2M+ BTC worth ~$400M  —  Russian-Swedish national Roman Sterlingov was convicted by a federal jury in Washington, D.C., for operating Bitcoin Fog between 2011 and 2021.
Chris Eggertsen / Billboard:
Neil Young brings his music back to Spotify after requesting its removal in January 2022, saying “Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation”  —  The singer-songwriter previously had his music removed from the platform over what he deemed the spread of vaccine misinformation on the Joe Rogan Experience.
Timmy Shen / The Block:
US Copyright Office and USPTO study: existing IP laws are sufficient to address NFT copyright infringement concerns and changes are not currently necessary  —  - The intellectual property authorities in the U.S. noted in an NFT study that the current laws are sufficient to address infringement concerns.
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
Don Lemon says Elon Musk canceled The Don Lemon Show's partnership with X, hours after taping an interview with Musk on March 8 for the show's debut episode  —  The former CNN host interviewed the tech mogul last week, with the chat set to be the launch episode of his new ‘Don Lemon Show.’
George Hammond / Financial Times:
Memo: John Collison says Stripe is in “no rush” to go public and its payment volume rose 25% YoY to $1T in 2023; source: Stripe hit ~$1B in Q3 2023 net revenue  —  Payments company has become a Silicon Valley bellwether as its valuation has risen and fallen over the past few years
Patricia Hernandez / Polygon:
How MrBeast dominates this ostentatious YouTube era, using a fast, frantic, and omnipresent editing style, as his videos slowly evolve to focus on storytelling  —  Jimmy Donaldson warped YouTube in his image — but YouTube is warping him back  —  In the fall of 2023, a clip ripped from a video …
Mayank Parmar / BleepingComputer:
Brave says that daily Brave iOS app installs jumped from ~8K to over 11K after Apple added a default browser choice screen in the EU to comply with the DMA  —  Brave has seen a sharp increase in users installing its privacy-focused Brave Browser on iPhones after Apple introduced changes …
Tiernan Ray / ZDNet:
Cerebras announces the WSE-3, a TSMC-made 5nm chip almost the size of a 12-inch wafer with 4T transistors, up from 2.6T in the WSE-2, for training AI models  —  The race for ever-larger generative artificial intelligence models continues to fuel the chip industry.
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
How Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who returned in 2015 during a leadership crisis, grew the website from $12M in annual revenue to $800M+ and from 80 staff to 2,000  —  The site, a throwback to an earlier era of social media, is poised to go public as soon as next week.  It hasn't been easy to reach this point.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
RevenueCat survey of nearly 30K mobile subscription apps: only 17.2% will reach $1,000 in monthly revenue and only 3.5% will reach $10,000 in monthly revenue  —  Investors know that most startups fail, but something that may be less understood is how few mobile apps actually make money.
Wall Street Journal:
As TikTok faces a divestment bill in the US, a look at how lawmakers and the Biden administration quietly planned the legislation and caught TikTok by surprise  —  Executives of the video-messaging app thought they had fended off attacks.  Behind the scenes, lawmakers and Biden officials were working to force its ban or sale.

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