Techmeme
March 13, 2024, 10:43 AM

Top News

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 House vote, set for Wednesday, is expected to mark the first time a chamber of Congress has greenlit legislation to ban a social media platform.
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.
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 …
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Spotify rolls out music videos to its mobile and desktop apps in beta in 11 markets, including Brazil, Italy, and the UK, available to 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 …
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.
Chris Eggertsen / Billboard:
Neil Young is bringing back his music to Spotify, after the 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.
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.
Timmy Shen / The Block:
A study by the US Copyright Office and USPTO concludes that existing laws are sufficient to address NFT copyright concerns and there's no need to change IP laws  —  - The intellectual property authorities in the U.S. noted in an NFT study that the current laws are sufficient to address infringement concerns.
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.
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 …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Bluesky open sources its collaborative moderation tool Ozone and plans to let users run their own independent moderation services later this week  —  Decentralized Twitter/X rival Bluesky announced today that it's open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets individuals and teams collaboratively review and label content on the network.
Mayank Parmar / BleepingComputer:
Brave says after Apple added a default browser choice screen in the EU, daily installations of Brave on iOS jumped from ~8K to over 11K  —  Brave has seen a sharp increase in users installing its privacy-focused Brave Browser on iPhones after Apple introduced changes to adhere to the new European Digital Markets Act.
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
How Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who returned in 2015 during a leadership crisis, grew the website to $800M+ in annual revenue and 2,000 staff, up from 80 in 2015  —  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 finds that only 17.2% of them will reach $1,000 in monthly revenue and only 3.5% will reach $10,000  —  Investors know that most startups fail, but something that may be less understood is how few mobile apps actually make money.
Financial Times:
Docs: Nigeria, which has held two Binance execs since February during a crypto exchange crackdown, is pushing for data on Binance's top 100 local users and more  —  Authorities hold senior company executives for two weeks after crackdown on cryptocurrency websites

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