11:20 PM • | Jay Peters / The Verge: Microsoft says it is exploring placing ads in Bing Chat and sharing the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response |
11:10 PM • | Jonathan Greig / The Record: The US sends $25M to Costa Rica for Conti ransomware recovery and gave $25M last month to help Albania recover from a ransomware attack allegedly caused by Iran |
10:40 PM • | Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica: Reddit says in 2022 it removed 473% more subreddits and permanently suspended 244% more users accounts violating its policy on non-consensual intimate imagery |
10:20 PM • | Emily Olsen / MobiHealthNews: Paris-based Inato, which offers a marketplace to connect pharmaceutical companies with clinical trial sites, raised a $20M Series A2 led by Cathay Innovation |
10:00 PM • | James Reddick / The Record: The FDA says approval for medical devices now requires meeting certain cybersecurity standards issued in the omnibus spending bill signed in December 2022 |
9:35 PM • | Karissa Bell / Engadget: Twitter details new API access tiers: Free with 1.5K tweets/month at app level, Basic for $100/month, and Enterprise; old APIs will stop working within 30 days |
8:25 PM • | Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Netflix's iOS app code suggests the company may expand its video game service to TV sets for the first time, using phones as controllers |
8:05 PM • | Jon Victor / The Information: Sources: Google Brain and DeepMind have been forced to work together on a project known as Gemini to compete with OpenAI's GPT-4, after Bard's stumble |
6:50 PM • | Meghan Bobrowsky / Wall Street Journal: WeMeta: the median price per square meter of land in Decentraland has dropped from ~$45 in 2022 to $5 in 2023, as the hype around the metaverse has receded |
5:40 PM • | Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Google launches an Ads Transparency Center, showing all the ads from verified advertisers on its platforms, in the formats, the regions, and the dates they ran |
5:20 PM • | New York Times: How NetEase and Activision's 14-year partnership fell apart, in part due to China's tech crackdown, as filings show the deal was worth ~$750M in annual revenue |
4:50 PM • | Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: NYC-based LeapXpert, which monitors staff business chats via apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, and iMessage for compliance, raised a $22M Series A+ led by Rockefeller |
4:30 PM • | Sarah E. Needleman / Wall Street Journal: EA plans to lay off ~6% of its workforce and cut its office space, incurring $170M to $200M in restructuring charges; EA had nearly 13,000 employees in mid-2022 |
3:55 PM • | Akash Pasricha / The Information: Sources: Gemini is preparing to launch an international crypto derivatives exchange to offer perpetual futures, which US regulations prohibit for retail traders |
3:35 PM • | Financial Times: As Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and others cut their responsible AI teams, experts worry about potential abuses, disinformation, and hallucination |
3:05 PM • | Justin Ling / Wired: Docs: investments in 4chan include $800K from owner Hiroyuki Nishimura, $4.8M from his company, and $2.4M from Tokyo-based Good Smile, which makes Disney toys |
2:05 PM • | Dan Taylor / Tech.eu: Paris-based Glopal, which helps e-commerce merchants sell globally through localization, marketing, logistics, and payments services, raised a €20M Series A |
1:03 PM • | Juli Clover / MacRumors: Apple schedules WWDC 2023 for June 5 to June 9 as a virtual event with a June 5 keynote, where iOS 17, iPadOS 17, tvOS 17, watchOS 10, and macOS 14 are expected |
1:00 PM • | Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: UK-based Fetch.ai, which develops infrastructure to help “build, deploy, and connect smart agents to automate Web3 systems”, raised $40M from DWF Labs |
12:25 PM • | Christopher M. Matthews / Wall Street Journal: Court records and messages from alleged hackers reveal a massive hacking campaign targeting thousands of environmental activists, dating back to at least 2017 |
12:10 PM • | Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer: Researchers find a flaw in Wi-Fi protocol IEEE 802.11 that could be exploited to inject malicious content into TCP packets and more, impacting routers and OSes |
11:45 AM • | Sarah Wynn / The Block: The SEC sues shuttered crypto exchange Beaxy and its execs for allegedly not registering and Beaxy Digital's founder for raising $8M via unregistered token BXY |
11:05 AM • | Nilay Patel / The Verge: Q&A with Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko on open-source governance, business models, rejecting VC firms, running instances, ActivityPub, content moderation, and more |
10:35 AM • | Forbes: Sources: Sam Bankman-Fried is paying his mounting legal fees from a $10M+ tax-free gift he gave his father with money borrowed from Alameda in 2021 |
10:00 AM • | Wall Street Journal: Nansen: Binance saw net outflows of $2.1B on Ethereum from March 20 to March 27, as the exchange raised fees, suffered software issues, and faces a CFTC lawsuit |
9:20 AM • | Scott Chipolina / Financial Times: Docs: Binance's CEO and other executives hid the company's China ties for years, including an office used until 2019, despite saying Binance left China in 2017 |
8:20 AM • | Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Google plans to launch extreme heat alerts in Search, including telling users when a heat wave is expected to start and end, keeping safe, and tips to stay cool |
7:20 AM • | Sam Reynolds / CoinDesk: A US court rules the bZx protocol meets the definition of a general partnership and finds the DAO's token holders are liable for losses from a $55M hack in 2021 |
7:05 AM • | Reuters: The UK CMA launches an in-depth investigation, which can take up to six months, of Broadcom's $61B VMware acquisition, after Broadcom failed to address concerns |
6:30 AM • | Delphine Strauss / Financial Times: Goldman Sachs research finds generative AI could increase annual global GDP by 7% over a 10-year period and expose 300M full-time jobs to automation globally |
5:45 AM • | Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Berlin-based Hygraph, which offers a federated content management service, raised a $30M Series B led by One Peak Partners, bringing its total funding to $43.7M |
5:17 AM • | Indu Bhan / The Economic Times: India's National Company Law Appellate Tribunal upholds the ~$160M fine imposed on Google by the Competition Commission of India in the Android antitrust case |
4:55 AM • | Tracy Wen Liu / Wired: TikTok, Amazon, and others struggle to adopt China's livestream ecommerce model in the US, as experts point to differences in US and Chinese consumer behavior |
4:10 AM • | Ryan Browne / CNBC: The UK government publishes recommendations for AI and tasks regulators with issuing practical guidance to organizations on implementing them in their sectors |
2:25 AM • | Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Lemon8, ByteDance's Instagram rival launched in March 2020, hits the US App Store's top 10; data.ai: Lemon8 never before ranked in the US top 200 overall charts |
1:55 AM • | Bloomberg: Perplexity AI, which is building an AI conversational search engine, raised a $25.6M Series A led by NEA with participation from Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, and others |
12:35 AM • | Financial Times: A profile of Swedish gaming company Embracer, whose growth via frantic dealmaking has raised questions of financial performance, accounting practices, and more |
11:30 PM • | Jonathan Greig / The Record: Pennsylvania-based NCB Management Services, which purchases debt, says hackers leaked the sensitive financial info of 494,969 people after a company cyberattack |
10:50 PM • | Max Goldbart / Deadline: The UK publishes its draft Media Bill that could see Netflix, Disney+, and other US streamers fined up to £250K for breaking harmful material rules under Ofcom |
10:40 PM • | Future of Life Institute: Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and 1,000+ people sign an open letter urging AI labs to pause the training of systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months |
10:05 PM • | Bloomberg: The FDIC tells Signature's crypto depositors that they must close their accounts by April 5, as Flagstar Bank's bid excludes ~$4B in Signature's crypto deposits |
9:25 PM • | Santiago Pérez / Wall Street Journal: How a New York couple, who used to host an RT show, became key advisers to El Salvador on its bitcoin adoption while making crypto investments in the country |
7:35 PM • | Jeremy C. Owens / MarketWatch: Micron reports Q2 revenue down 53% YoY to $3.69B, vs. $3.71B est., and a $2.31B record net loss after a $1.43B write-down, as executives hint at a market bottom |
6:40 PM • | Malathi Nayak / Bloomberg: A US federal judge finds Google flouted a court order requiring the company to save records of staff chats in antitrust litigation over its Play Store policies |
6:00 PM • | Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE: Cerebras open sources seven GPT-based LLMs, ranging from 111M to 13B parameters and trained using its Andromeda supercomputer for AI, on GitHub and Hugging Face |
5:30 PM • | Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Google plans to add a “Perspectives” carousel, showcasing experts and others under Top Stories, and an “About this author” feature for US English searches |
5:05 PM • | Andy Greenberg / Wired: Researchers say North Korean hackers are likely laundering stolen crypto by renting cloud compute to mine fresh coins, avoiding more scrutinized crypto mixers |
4:55 PM • | Malathi Nayak / Bloomberg: Filing: Twitter wins an order from a California court to subpoena GitHub for information on FreeSpeechEnthusiast, the alleged leaker of some Twitter source code |
4:10 PM • | Zac Bowden / Windows Central: Microsoft announces a second-generation Surface Hub 2S is coming later in 2023 and will become the first “touch-enabled board” to run Teams Rooms on Windows |
3:00 PM • | New York Times: On TikTok, #TikTokBan had 1.7B views on March 27, up from 983M views on March 18, as users post hundreds of videos arguing the app shouldn't be banned in the US |
2:50 PM • | Lena Masri / Reuters: A review of 2,000+ court cases: Russia uses facial recognition and video surveillance systems to find and arrest hundreds of protesters or even prevent protests |
1:50 PM • | BBC: Clearview AI's CEO says the company has run nearly 1M searches for US police and now uses 30B images scraped without users' consent from sites like Facebook |
1:15 PM • | Dina Bass / Bloomberg: To compete with GitHub Copilot, Google partners with Replit, which used AI to make coding tools and will now rely on Google's LLMs for its Ghostwriter product |
12:50 PM • | Kari McMahon / The Block: EigenLabs, working on an ETH “restaking” protocol, raised a $50M Series A led by Blockchain Capital, with Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital among investors |
12:05 PM • | Gary Marcus / The Road to AI We Can Trust: Discounting AI's short-term risks, from phishing to fraud to propaganda, because artificial general intelligence is not here yet leaves society ill-prepared |
12:00 PM • | Emma Roth / The Verge: Apple rolls out Apple Pay Later to select US users, for online and in-app purchases on iOS 16.4 and iPadOS 16.4, available to all US users in the coming months |
11:50 AM • | Stratechery: Plugins turn ChatGPT into an aggregator, signaling a major shift in ambition that puts OpenAI well on its way to becoming the next major consumer tech platform |
11:46 AM • | Tom Warren / The Verge: Microsoft launches Security Copilot, a GPT-4-powered assistant to help security professionals with incident investigations, event summaries, reporting, and more |
11:35 AM • | Zac Bowden / Windows Central: Sources: Microsoft plans a major overhaul for “Windows 12” to modernize the OS with AI, faster updates, and improved security, to better compete with ChromeOS |
11:30 AM • | Sara Fischer / Axios: Substack invites its newsletter writers and others to invest, raising $5M+; source: the raise is an extension of Substack's $65M Series B in March 2021 |
11:20 AM • | Bloomberg: Sources: Microsoft is near a deal with cloud providers OVHcloud, Aruba, and Danish Cloud Community to pull their antitrust complaints to the European Commission |
11:10 AM • | Wall Street Journal: Citizen Lab: Russia's PROTEI is selling internet censorship software to Iranian telco Ariantel, for monitoring and intercepting all Iranians' communications |
11:00 AM • | Ben Schoon / 9to5Google: Google and ADT debut ADT Self Setup, a SimpliSafe-like security system integrated with nearly all Nest products and also offers sensors, a keypad, and more |
10:40 AM • | Politico: Documents and sources: Belgian intelligence is investigating Huawei to determine if the company's Brussels lobbying office has direct ties to China's government |
10:05 AM • | Reuters: US prosecutors file a new indictment against SBF, accusing him of ordering an Alameda payment of $40M+ in cryptocurrency to bribe Chinese government officials |
9:15 AM • | Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge: Amazon opens Sidewalk to developers, offering SDKs and hardware development kits, and claims 90%+ of the US population can now access the long-range IoT network |
9:05 AM • | Maria Deutscher / SiliconANGLE: Graphiant, which provides a networking service that lets companies link their cloud environments, data centers, and other tech assets, raised a $62M Series B |
8:55 AM • | Shaurya Malwa / CoinDesk: CryptoQuant: BUSD saw $500M+ in outflows in the ~24 hours after the CFTC filed its Binance lawsuit vs. $2B after the SEC's Paxos crackdown in February 2023 |
8:15 AM • | Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: China-based Venti Technologies, which develops autonomous vehicle tech for industrial and logistics hubs, raised a $28.8M Series A led by LG Technology Ventures |
7:25 AM • | Lauren Kaori Gurley / Washington Post: The CWA files NLRB charges alleging that Apple fired five workers in Kansas City in retaliation for organizing, the first such Apple charges the union has filed |
6:41 AM • | Zhou Xin / South China Morning Post: Alibaba plans its biggest restructuring ever, reorganizing its businesses into six independent entities and moving all operational decisions to each unit's CEO |
6:30 AM • | Financial Times: Sources: Sam Bankman-Fried gave some Genesis executives the chance to invest in discounted presale tokens of FTT and Serum, before they were issued publicly |
6:10 AM • | Kiyoshi Takenaka / Reuters: Japan's FTC says the watchdog does not expect the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard deal to stifle competition and closes its review without a cease and desist |
5:30 AM • | BBC: The UK cancels its plans to launch an NFT, proposed in April 2022 by Rishi Sunak in a bid to make the UK a crypto hub, but will keep the proposal “under review” |
5:15 AM • | Reuters: Sam Bankman-Fried's lawyers and US prosecutors reach new bail terms, including giving SBF a phone without internet and a monitored laptop with limited functions |
4:40 AM • | Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Source: Microsoft's GitHub lays off its entire engineering team in India, eliminating 100+ jobs, as part of a ~10% cut that GitHub announced in February 2023 |
4:15 AM • | Katyanna Quach / The Register: Europol details how LLMs can be used to fuel fraud, cybercrime, and terrorism, and claims criminals are already misusing ChatGPT to carry out illegal activities |
2:33 AM • | Salvador Rodriguez / Wall Street Journal: Memo: Meta plans to lower its bonus multiplier from 85% to 65% and cut restricted stock awards for staff who “met most expectations” in its 2023 year-end review |
2:00 AM • | Wall Street Journal: Sources: Huobi partnered with Dominica and prompts new Chinese users to apply for a Dominican digital citizenship to evade China's crypto trading restrictions |
12:55 AM • | Emily Birnbaum / Bloomberg: Google asks a US judge to dismiss a DOJ lawsuit alleging the company abused its ad dominance, arguing the government excluded rivals when defining the market |
12:30 AM • | Rest of World: A look at Meta's “spirit of the policy” exception that lets the company break its moderation rules in conflict zones and crises; critics want more transparency |
11:25 PM • | Wall Street Journal: Sources: Disney closes its metaverse unit, cutting ~50 jobs, and cancels an Amazon Prime-like program integrating Disney+, online retail, and theme park apps |
11:05 PM • | Scott Stein / CNET: An interview with Roblox Studio Head Stefano Corazza on Roblox's new AI tools, generative AI's impact on AR/VR, building a more contextual moderation, and more |
10:55 PM • | Wall Street Journal: Uber Eats plans to remove 5,000 virtual brands to declutter its app and introduce guidelines to stop restaurants from listing multiple brands with the same menu |
9:05 PM • | Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Snap's head of growth and previously longtime product head Jacob Andreou plans to leave in May 2023 after eight years to join Greylock as a general partner |
8:36 PM • | The Verge: Elon Musk says only verified accounts will be recommended in Twitter's For You tab and be able to vote in polls to address “AI bot swarms”, starting on April 15 |
8:31 PM • | Zoë Schiffer / Platformer: Documents: Twitter closely monitors and boosts ~35 accounts, including AOC, President Biden, Ben Shapiro, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, @catturd2, and MrBeast |
7:50 PM • | Jeremy Hill / Bloomberg: Filing: a federal judge grants the US government's request to halt Voyager's bankruptcy plan, putting Binance.US' proposed $1B acquisition of Voyager on hold |
6:51 PM • | Binance Blog: Binance CEO CZ says the CFTC's complaint has an “incomplete recitation of facts” and Binance disagrees with the “characterization of many of the issues alleged” |
6:20 PM • | Fiona Alston / Tech.eu: Germany-based OQmented, which is developing laser beam scanning tech for displays in AR/MR glasses, raised a $20M Series A from Sharp Devices Europe and others |
5:55 PM • | Katie Haun / Wall Street Journal: Regulators are choking the crypto industry in the US, but major policy decisions should be made by Congress and state legislatures, not by unelected officials |
5:30 PM • | Joseph Menn / Washington Post: Many of the top VPN services and apps, some with 100M+ downloads, have misled users about their practices while disguising their ownership, like ties to China |
5:20 PM • | Annie Palmer / CNBC: A fifth defendant plans to plead guilty to the DOJ's charges in 2020 regarding a conspiracy to bribe Amazon staff to give sellers unfair marketplace advantages |
5:15 PM • | Kat Tenbarge / NBC News: A look at the non-consensual deepfake porn economy, with video sites easily accessible via top Google search results and some accepting Visa and Mastercard |
4:45 PM • | Rohan Goswami / CNBC: Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer plan to step down as CEO on April 17 and president on June 30; ex-Amazon executive David Risher is set to be CEO |
4:10 PM • | Matt Levine / Bloomberg: The CFTC's case vs. Binance is mainly about US clients, like high-frequency trading firms in NYC and Chicago, using an unregistered crypto derivatives exchange |
3:25 PM • | Margaux Nijkerk / CoinDesk: Polygon launches the mainnet beta of its zkEVM layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, three days after rival Matter Labs released its own zkEVM, zkSync Era |
3:15 PM • | Sam Kim / Bloomberg: SEMI forecasts South Korea will increase its spending on advanced chipmaking equipment by 41.5% YoY to $21B in 2024, versus China's 2% YoY increase to $16.6B |
2:40 PM • | Alexander Onukwue / Semafor: Similarweb: Chinese-owned OPay and PalmPay became the Play Store's top two finance apps in Nigeria on March 24 after a central bank edict caused a cash shortage |
2:17 PM • | Juli Clover / MacRumors: Apple debuts iOS 16.4 with 21 new emoji, Safari push notifications for web apps on the Home Screen, Voice Isolation for calls, Crash Detection tweaks, and more |
1:20 PM • | Lyllah Ledesma / CoinDesk: Kaiko data: March 26 was Binance's lowest BTC volume day since July 4, 2022, a few days before the exchange added zero-fee trading, mostly phased out last week |
12:30 PM • | Dustin Volz / Wall Street Journal: Biden signs an EO limiting US agencies' use of hacking tools from companies that are linked to human rights abuses or are deemed to pose national security risks |
11:55 AM • | Emma Roth / The Verge: Zoom partners with OpenAI to expand its Zoom IQ assistant with features to generate whiteboards from text prompts, recap meetings, summarize threads, and more |
11:50 AM • | CFTC: The CFTC sues Binance, CEO CZ, and a former chief compliance officer, calling the company's compliance efforts “a sham” and its structure “intentionally opaque” |
11:25 AM • | Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch: Microsoft says Teams has 280M MAUs, up from 270M MAUs in January 2022, and the rebuilt Teams rolling out to Windows' Public Preview program is twice as fast |
11:07 AM • | Bloomberg: Binance Sued by US Watchdog for Alleged Derivatives Rule Lapses |
10:40 AM • | Larry DiTore / The Block: Filing: MicroStrategy bought 6,455 BTC for ~$150M from February 16 to March 23 at an average price of $23,238; the company held ~$4.14B worth of BTC on March 23 |
9:35 AM • | Chris Welch / The Verge: Sonos Era 300 review: the best spatial audio from any speaker, flexible connectivity options, but a poor Sonos app UX, and spatial audio quality varies by track |
8:35 AM • | Matt Burgess / Wired: Porn creators in Germany face fines and imprisonment as regulators use AI to spot porn not protected by age verification tech on social media and messaging apps |
7:55 AM • | Bloomberg: Huawei announces tools for designing chips as advanced as 14nm, about four generations behind the latest available, to help Chinese companies replace US tech |
7:20 AM • | Reuters: Sources: Jack Ma has returned to China after over a year; sources: since late 2022, China Premier Li Qiang had urged Ma to return to allay private sector fears |
6:50 AM • | Richard Milne / Financial Times: Ammo maker Nammo says its growth is limited by a TikTok data center using all the spare electricity, as energy demand across industries grows in the Nordics |
6:25 AM • | Paul Sawers / TechCrunch: Activist investor Elliott Management decides not to nominate its directors to Salesforce's board, citing Salesforce's FY 2023 results, growth plans, and more |
5:55 AM • | Sarah Zheng / Bloomberg: Kaspersky: some versions of Pinduoduo, which Google suspended from its app store, exploited Android vulnerabilities to install backdoors and access user data |
4:55 AM • | Alex Hern / The Guardian: Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan says crypto does not “bring anything useful for society” and other processing power uses like AI are more worthwhile than mining crypto |
4:35 AM • | Simon Sharwood / The Register: The French government bans TikTok and all other recreational apps from staff phones, claiming that none have sufficiently robust security for government devices |
4:05 AM • | Michael Pooler / Financial Times: Alex Szapiro, co-head of SoftBank's nearly $8B Latin America fund, says he is confident about securing extra capital from its parent despite a ~$900M paper loss |
1:50 AM • | Daniel Taub / Bloomberg: First Citizens agrees to acquire Silicon Valley Bank's commercial banking business from the FDIC, including all deposits and loans, at a $16.5B discount |