Techmeme
March 30, 2023, 3:30 AM
 

March 30, 2023

2:50 AM  •
Sam Reynolds / CoinDesk:  Crypto exchange OKX says its has identified $157M in digital assets belonging to FTX and Alameda Research, and is turning them over to the bankruptcy estate
2:30 AM  •
Reuters:  Alibaba says it may cede control of some businesses if they opt to list after its overhaul and plans to monetize non-core assets to improve capital structure
1:50 AM  •
Jonathan Greig / The Record:  Google's Threat Analysis Group details two limited but highly targeted spyware campaigns using several zero-day exploits against Android, iOS, and Chrome
12:50 AM  •
Financial Times:  Sources: Meta is considering a company-wide political ads ban in Europe, concerned its platforms will be unable to comply with forthcoming online campaign laws
12:15 AM  •
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:  Researchers say hackers have compromised the 3CX VoIP IPBX desktop app, used by 600K+ companies and 12M+ daily users, in an ongoing supply chain attack

March 29, 2023

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

March 28, 2023

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

March 27, 2023

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

March 26, 2023

11:15 PM  •
Sarah E. Needleman / Wall Street Journal:  A look at Modulate's ToxMod and other AI-based tools that help gaming companies moderate voice chats in online games, amid concerns of accuracy and user privacy
11:05 PM  •
Bloomberg:  Sources: the Hong Kong arms of three Chinese state banks reached out to offer services to crypto companies in the past few months, despite a mainland crypto ban
10:40 PM  •
Pranshu Verma / Washington Post:  A mid-March Midjourney update seemingly fixed one of the AI image generator's major failings: its inability to depict lifelike human hands with five fingers
8:35 PM  •
Samriddhi Sakunia / Rest of World:  After India's legal orders this week, Twitter blocked the tweets of 122 users, including reporters and politicians, from Indian users; it used to push back more
8:00 PM  •
ProPublica:  A look at OBNBrandon, a prolific scammer in a booming community focused on banning influencers' accounts, mainly on Instagram, and extorting for “reactivation”
6:30 PM  •
New York Times:  Filing: some Twitter source code was leaked by user “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” on GitHub, which removed the code to comply with Twitter's DMCA notice on March 24
2:00 PM  •
MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC:  A profile of Atlanta-based Yellow Card, Africa's largest centralized crypto exchange, which raised $57M and facilitated $1.75B in transactions since 2019
11:40 AM  •
New York Times:  Eight current and former Apple employees share their concerns about the upcoming MR headset's $3,000 price, its utility, and the unproven AR/VR market
10:25 AM  •
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:  Sources: Apple last week demoed its mixed reality headset, likely dubbed Reality Pro or Reality One, for its top ~100 executives, ahead of their annual offsite
8:10 AM  •
Viola Zhou / Rest of World:  A look at the Chinese social e-commerce app and women-friendly “lifestyle bible” Xiaohongshu, which has 200M MAUs and critics describe as a consumerist trap
5:05 AM  •
Wall Street Journal:  Experts say some US suppliers plan to sidestep export controls by selling tech to the unlisted subsidiaries of Inspur and other Chinese firms on the Entity List
2:00 AM  •
Chloe Xiang / VICE:  A look at the community of users who “jailbreak” GPT models to generate unfiltered content and see themselves as fighting back against OpenAI's closed policies
1:35 AM  •
Joe Brock / Reuters:  Sources: concerned about Chinese spying, the US helped SubCom win its $600M bid for a Singapore-France subsea cable project via incentives and investor pressure
1:20 AM  •
Taylor Lorenz / Washington Post:  Hollywood and music industry insiders, actors, and others say a TikTok ban could seriously hurt their businesses and are scrambling to create contingency plans
12:35 AM  •
Nikkei Asia:  Meta Quest Pro teardown: US parts account for 34% of the headset's estimated $440 in component costs, China 18%, South Korea 10%, Japan 3%, and 35% unidentified

March 25, 2023

11:45 PM  •
Erin Woo / The Information:  Source: Elon Musk emailed Twitter employees offering stock grants at a ~$20B valuation, or 55% less than what he paid to buy the company
11:20 PM  •
Adam Morgan McCarthy / The Block:  The hacker of DeFi lending protocol Euler Finance returns 58,737 ETH, worth ~$102M, from the 96K ETH stolen in a flash-loan attack on March 13; EUL jumps ~27%
9:45 PM  •
Eric Benjamin Seufert / Mobile Dev Memo:  How Meta could sidestep ATT's impairments by launching a mobile games store, as Apple reportedly prepares multiple app store support on iOS due to the EU's DMA
7:55 PM  •
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:  Microsoft releases Windows 10 Snip & Sketch and Windows 11 Snipping Tool updates to fix the “aCropalypse” bug used to reveal info edited out in some screenshots
6:05 PM  •
Anna Tong / Reuters:  Replika restores erotic roleplay for users who signed up before February 1, after complaints from some who considered themselves “married” to chatbot companions
2:50 PM  •
Alexa Corse / Wall Street Journal:  Email: Twitter offers four-year equity grants to staff, on top of legacy equity, that will start to vest after six months and plans a liquidity event in a year
1:00 PM  •
Chloe Xiang / VICE:  Microsoft researchers claim GPT-4 showed early signs of AGI and performance close to human levels in tasks spanning coding, medicine, law, psychology, and more
12:00 PM  •
Yoel Roth / Techdirt:  Some national security concerns about TikTok are valid, but a forced sale of its US operations may undermine the company's ability to fight adversarial threats
10:20 AM  •
Financial Times:  In his first visit since 2020, Tim Cook praises Apple's “symbiotic kind of relationship” with China, amid the company's moves to diversify from the country
5:05 AM  •
Lisa Baertlein / Reuters:  A look at Amazon's efforts to offset its shipping costs by raising Prime subscription prices, increasing the minimum purchase free shipping threshold, and more

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