Techmeme
April 1, 2024, 5:00 AM

Top News

Mike Larkin / Security Boulevard:
Microsoft engineer Andres Freund accidentally found the malicious code in versions of the XZ Utils compression tool, likely preventing thousands of infections  —  Yesterday's discovery of the xz backdoor was an accident.  But what a fortunate accident it was.
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
AT&T confirms data dumped online appears to be from 2019 or earlier and has personal data of 7.6M current and 65.4M former account holders, resets passcodes  —  US telco giant takes action after 2019 data breach  —  Phone giant AT&T is reseting customer account passcodes after a huge cache …
John Thornhill / Financial Times:
Demis Hassabis says the AI hype caused by a surge of money is clouding research; CB Insights: VCs invested $42.5B in 2,500 AI startup equity rounds in 2023  —  British AI pioneer says the billions of dollars being poured into start-ups is obscuring scientific progress in the field
Julie Jargon / Wall Street Journal:
Some teens say a Snapchat+ feature that lets users see their position in their friends' digital orbits, rendered as a solar system, is adding to their anxieties  —  Drama, hurt feelings and heartbreak can result when teens see where they are in friends' Snapchat+ solar systems
Wall Street Journal:
Discord plans to start showing gaming ads from next week, called Sponsored Quests and offering rewards for in-game tasks; users can turn them off in settings  —  The chat platform, which has long avoided advertising, is latest tech company to lean into paid promotions
Wall Street Journal:
Ampere: seven movie adaptations of video games were released broadly in 2023; Comscore: movies based on video games grossed $712.2M at the US box office in 2023  —  Studios seek the wisdom of die-hard gaming fans.  ‘Every design now is vetted within an inch of its life.’  —  Sonic's teeth were creepy.
Heather Knight / New York Times:
A profile of YC's Garry Tan, whose combative online persona has sparked controversies as he tries to shift SF politics from idealistic progressivism to centrism  —  The tech investor Garry Tan has courted San Francisco's moderate Democrats and angered its progressives.Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
Katie Hafner / New York Times:
Dan Lynch, founder of Interop, a computer networking equipment exhibition that helped accelerate TCP/IP adoption and internet commercialization, dies at age 82  —  After working on the earliest version of the internet, he saw its potential and founded a conference on computer networking equipment.
More: The VergeForums: Hacker News
Pranav Dixit / Engadget:
How WhatsApp became the world's default communication app, including as a political propaganda tool, a business tool, and a private social network  —  What was once a texting platform now runs the lives, businesses and political machinery of billions.  —  In 2014, WIRED asked me to write …

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Earlier Picks

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Knowing Machines:
Candice L. Odgers / Nature: