Techmeme
July 10, 2024, 8:20 AM

Top News

Financial Times:
Source: Apple is not taking an OpenAI board observer role, as AI antitrust scrutiny mounts; OpenAI plans to host regular meetings with investors and partners  —  ChatGPT maker plans strategy to engage crucial partners as regulatory scrutiny of sector increases
Ina Fried / Axios:
Microsoft gives up an observer seat on OpenAI's board, citing the new board's “significant progress” and saying the company is “confident” in OpenAI's direction  —  - “We appreciate the support shown by OpenAI leadership and the OpenAI board as we made this decision,” Microsoft said.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft hikes the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate by $3 to $19.99/month for new subscribers and plans a Standard tier for $14.99/month without day-one titles  —  Microsoft is planning to hike its Xbox Game Pass Ultimate pricing again in September, alongside launching a new “standard” …
Akshat Rathi / Bloomberg:
Environmental report: Google stops buying carbon offsets and no longer maintains operational carbon neutrality, but still aims to reach net-zero carbon by 2030  —  The tech giant, which has seen its planet-warming emissions rise because of artificial intelligence, has stopped buying cheap offsets behind the neutrality claim.
Financial Times:
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Researchers detail the Blast-RADIUS MD5-based vulnerability affecting RADIUS, a widely-used network access authentication protocol first developed in 1991  —  Ubiquitous RADIUS scheme uses homegrown authentication based on MD5.  Yup, you heard right.  —  One of the most widely used network protocols …
Michael Kan / PCMag:
The US DOJ and its partners seized two domain names and 968 accounts on X used by Russian actors to create an AI-enhanced bot farm that spread disinformation  —  Russian media outlet RT ran the bot farm to pump out disinformation via 968 Twitter accounts, the US Justice Department says.
Kwanwoo Jun / Wall Street Journal:
Samsung Electronics's union workers declare an indefinite strike on the final day of a three-day walkout and say management showed no intention of holding talks  —  Union cites management's unwillingness to talk to union leaders  —  Samsung Electronics unionized workers have decided to launch …
Wes Davis / The Verge:
Google now lets Advanced Protection Program users set up with a single passkey, using Android or iOS biometric authentication, instead of two physical keys  —  Google has made it a little easier for those at more risk of targeted online attacks to enroll in its Advanced Protection Program for Google accounts.
Harshita Mary Varghese / Reuters:
IDC: global PC shipments rose 3% YoY to 64.9M units in Q2 2024; Apple's shipments rose 20.8% YoY, the biggest jump among global PC makers  —  Global shipments of personal computers rose by 3% in the second quarter, helped by demand for AI-capable devices, with Apple (AAPL.O) …
Anissa Gardizy / The Information:
Sources: xAI ends talks with Oracle to expand an existing arrangement to rent Nvidia chips; source: Oracle is not part of xAI's supercomputer project in Memphis  —  Larry Ellison may be a friend and backer of Elon Musk, but even the Oracle executive chair isn't immune from Musk's impatience.
Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes:
Skild AI, which is building a foundational model for robotics, raised a $300M Series A at a $1.5B valuation led by Lightspeed, SoftBank, Coatue, and Jeff Bezos  —  Skild AI has raised $300 million to continue building its plug-and-play robotic intelligence with the hope of enabling companies to integrate it into robots of all kinds.
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Anthropic now lets developers use Claude 3.5 Sonnet to generate, test, and evaluate their prompts, and adds new features, like generating automatic test cases  —  Prompt engineering became a hot job last year in the AI industry, but it seems Anthropic is now developing tools to at least partially automate it.
Kate Clark / The Information:
Source: a16z has secured thousands of AI chips, including Nvidia H100 GPUs, and is renting them to portfolio companies, with the aim of expanding to 20K+ GPUs  —  Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most active venture capital investors in generative artificial intelligence …
Carly Page / TechCrunch:
Filing: Evolve Bank & Trust says LockBit accessed the personal data of at least 7.6M people during a February 2024 ransomware attack  —  U.S.-based banking-as-a-service giant Evolve Bank & Trust said that cybercriminals accessed the personal data of millions of customers during a recent cyberattack.
CNN:
An investigation finds Airbnb fails to protect its guests from hidden cameras and moves swiftly to contain user complaints and resolve them out of court  —  Watch AC360 at 8pm ET tonight for more on this investigation, including where cameras can be hidden inside Airbnb rentals.  —  CNN —
Wired:
Elliptic finds a Cambodian online market offering the crypto scam industry products and services, including money laundering and victim data, with $11B in sales  —  Deepfake scam services.  Victim data.  Electrified shackles for human trafficking.  Crypto tracing firm Elliptic found …
Matthew Ball / MatthewBall.co:
Q&A with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth on the company's metaverse strategy, barriers to MR/VR growth, Reality Labs spending, AR glasses, AI, and more  —  On June 20th, I interviewed Andrew Bosworth.  “Boz” joined Facebook in 2006 as the company's ~10th engineer, subsequently building the original News Feed …

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More News

Financial Times:
Kamila Wojciechowska / Android Authority:
Matthew Connatser / The Register:

Earlier Picks

Grace Kay / Business Insider:
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Cristiano Lima-Strong / Washington Post:
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg: