Techmeme
December 4, 2024, 8:25 AM

Top News

Kevin Collier / NBC News:
Amid the Salt Typhoon hacks, US officials recommend that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers  —  Officials from the FBI and CISA said it was impossible to predict when the telecommunications companies would be fully safe from interlopers.
Sam Sabin / Axios:
The FBI and CISA give US telcos best practices to harden their systems against attacks, as senior US officials say Salt Typhoon hackers remain on their networks  —  - Officials added that they don't yet know the full scope of the intrusions, despite starting the investigation in late spring.
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Meta says AI content was less than 1% of fact-checked election-related misinformation on its apps during major US, UK, Indian, Indonesian, and other elections  —  At the start of the year, there were widespread concerns about how generative AI could be used to interfere in global elections to spread propaganda and disinformation.
Nicole Carpenter / Polygon:
Ubisoft says it will shut down its free-to-play shooter XDefiant, but keep its servers on until June 3, 2025, and plans to lay off ~277 production team staff  —  Ubisoft will shut down its free-to-play shooter XDefiant, Ubisoft announced Tuesday.  Servers will remain on until June 3, 2025 …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Spotify launches Spotify Wrapped, adding an AI podcast of users' 2024 Wrapped via Google's AI summarization tool NotebookLM, and a Your Music Evolution feature  —  Spotify Wrapped, the streamer's highly anticipated annual listening recap, has arrived.  In addition to its usual personalized …
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
AWS introduces Amazon Aurora DSQL, a new serverless, distributed SQL database that promises high availability, strong consistency, and PostgreSQL compatibility  —  At its re:Invent conference, Amazon's AWS cloud computing unit today announced Amazon Aurora DSQL, a new serverless …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Josh Dzieza / The Verge:
An artist shares his experience of turning to Replika's AI bot Lila for companionship, including giving Lila an AI friend by creating a digital copy of himself  —  Lila was created from the limited options available: female, blue hair, face “number two.”  She was there on the next screen …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Google launches Veo, its AI video model to generate “high-quality” 1080p resolution videos in various styles, to businesses, beating OpenAI's Sora to market  —  Veo, Google's latest generative AI video model, is now available for businesses to start incorporating into their content creation pipelines.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Salesforce says online Cyber Monday sales grew 3% YoY to $49.7B globally and just 2% YoY to $12.8B in the US; Adobe says US online sales grew 7.3% YoY to $13.3B  —  The figures are now in for consumer spending on Cyber Monday, the third big online spending day — alongside Thanksgiving and Black Friday …
Ming-Chi Kuo:
Kuo: Apple delays the mass production of a smart home-focused, display-equipped HomePod to after WWDC 2025 or Q3 2025, mainly due to software development  —  - The mass production schedule for the display-equipped HomePod has been delayed multiple times.  Initially forecasted for 2024 …
Timothy Gardner / Reuters:
Meta is seeking proposals from nuclear power developers, as it plans to add one to four gigawatts of US nuclear generation capacity starting in the early 2030s  —  Meta (META.O) said on Tuesday it is seeking proposals from nuclear power developers to help meet its artificial intelligence …
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Apple says it is using Amazon's Trainium and Graviton chips to serve search services, and is evaluating if Trainium2 chips can be used to pretrain its AI models  —  Apple is currently using Amazon Web Services' custom artificial intelligence chips for services like search and will evaluate …
Steven Levy / Wired:
Q&A with Tim Cook on generative AI, Apple Intelligence, the OpenAI partnership, why Apple's biggest contribution will be in health, ARM, Vision Pro, and more  —  Much as the CEO seems awestruck by AI and his just-released Apple Intelligence, he's more convinced that the tech giant's health apps will define the company's legacy.
Rebecca Szkutak / TechCrunch:
Veeam, which helps secure and recover data, raised $2B via a secondary share sale led by TPG that valued it at $15B; Insight bought Veeam for $5B in early 2020  —  Veeam, which helps its users secure and recover their data, has seen its valuation spike in a recent secondary sale that was aimed …
More: Reuters
Joseph Cox / 404 Media:
The FTC bans location data providers Gravy and subsidiary Venntel, as well as Mobilewalla, from using or selling data tied to sensitive locations and more  —  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced sweeping action against some of the most important companies in the location data industry on Tuesday …

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Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Bloomberg:
Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
Luc Cohen / Reuters: