~techmeme | Bookmarks (1039)

Wall Street Journal: Sources: in July 2024, Microsoft told top GOP officials that Chinese hackers had accessed the RNC email system for months; the RNC chose not to alert the FBI  —  The previously unreported intrusion came as the Trump campaign was hacked by Iranian operatives

Ina Fried / Axios: Access Now: 54 countries imposed internet shutdowns at least 296 times in 2024, led by Myanmar, displacing India from the top spot for the first time since 2018  —  - “As internet access becomes consistently weaponized, restricted, and precarious, we are seeing pervasive patterns …

Bloomberg: Documents and source: Indonesian agritech eFishery misrepresented financial figures for years; backers like SoftBank likely to recover under 10% of investments  —  - Startup's backers likely to recover under 10% of investments  — Indonesian firm allegedly misrepresented financials for years

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica: How hackers of the $1.5B Bybit crypto heist used UI manipulation of employee devices and social engineering to gain control of ETH multisig cold wallets  —  The cryptocurrency industry and those responsible for securing it are still in shock following Friday's heist, likely by North Korea …

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Sensor Tower: in 2024, TikTok, including its Chinese counterpart Douyin, became the first non-game app to reach $6B in annual in-app purchase revenue  —  TikTok, including its Chinese counterpart Douyin, in 2024 became the first non-game app to reach $6 billion in in-app purchase revenue in a year.

Business Insider: Sources: Mira Murati's new startup, Thinking Machines Lab, is aiming to raise $1B at a ~$9B valuation; the round is in progress and details could change  —  - OpenAI's former CTO, Mira Murati, debuted her new startup, Thinking Machine Labs, last week.  — The startup is aiming …

Sean Hollister / The Verge: Valve's Steam Deck, launched in 2022, has been dominating the handheld PC gaming market, with about 50% market share in 2024, according to IDC  —  Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, MSI Claw: The Steam Deck is bigger than them combined. … Today is the third anniversary of Valve's Steam Deck …

Anissa Gardizy / The Information: Sources: Meta is in talks to build a new data center campus for AI that could cost over $200B, based on the number of chips and the amount of power for the site  —  Meta Platforms is in talks to build a new data center campus for its artificial intelligence endeavors that would dwarf anything …

Lucy Adams / Tech.eu: Flow48, which provides revenue-based financing solutions for SME, raised a $69M Series A in debt and equity led by Breega and plans a Saudi Arabia expansion  —  The funding is comprised of a combination of debt and equity investment.  —  Fintech , whose platform enables SME lending across emerging markets …

The Information: Source: data security company Cohesity plans an employee share sale at an $8B valuation and expects to generate $2.2B in revenue in the 12 months ending in July  —  One of enterprise software's bitter rivalries—between data security firms Rubrik and Cohesity—came to a head last year …

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: xAI released a new Grok 3 voice mode featuring different personalities, including an 18+ “Unhinged” option and a “Sexy” one that role-plays sexual scenarios  —  On Sunday, xAI released a new voice interaction mode for its Grok 3 AI model that is currently available to its premium subscribers.

JR Raphael / Fast Company: Atlassian updates Trello with a new Inbox feature integrating tasks from email, Slack, Jira, and Siri, currently in beta and rolling out to all users in April  —  Riddle me this: What exactly is Trello?  —  Despite counting myself as a heavy-duty power user of the product for well over a decade now …

Charles Rollet / TechCrunch: After backlash, YC deletes a demo video from X and LinkedIn of a startup it backs that says it's building AI-powered performance monitoring for factory workers  —  A demo from Optifye.AI, a member of Y Combinator's current cohort, sparked a social media backlash that ended up with YC deleting it off its socials.

Pew Research Center: A survey of US workers in October 2024: 52% are worried about AI's workplace impact, 32% think it will mean fewer job opportunities, 36% feel hopeful, and more  —  About a third of workers say AI use will lead to fewer job opportunities for them in the long run; chatbots seen as more helpful …

Financial Times: Researchers estimate that air pollution related to data centers from Google, Microsoft, and Meta resulted in $5.4B in US public health costs from 2019 to 2023  —  Research suggests the price of treating illnesses related to building of computing infrastructure in the US is on the rise

Stu Woo / Wall Street Journal: The iPhone 16e gives Apple a chance to get more competitive in China, where rivals like Huawei are becoming more sophisticated with the government's help  —  The less-expensive 16e model arrives in the world's biggest smartphone market, where local tech companies benefit from Beijing's help

Sean Hollister / The Verge: Nvidia confirms a “rare” manufacturing issue affecting less than 0.5% of RTX 5090 and 5070 Ti GPUs which are missing render units, the latest hitch since launch  —  Where did the ROPs go? … In the grand scheme of things, that doesn't sound like a lot of affected GPUs …

Andrew Deck / Nieman Lab: Some journalists are taking freelance jobs with AI training data companies like Scale AI, which recruit them for tasks such as fact-checking and prompt drafting  —  The gig work platform Outlier is one of several companies courting journalists to train large language models (LLMs).

Enock Nyariki / Poynter: A Maldita study of nearly 1.2M Community Notes on X published globally in 2024 shows that professional fact-checkers are among the three most cited sources  —  Notes that cite fact-checkers earn more trust from X users and combat misinformation faster  —  When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced …

Eugene Kim / Business Insider: Filing: Amazon estimated the fair value of its stake in Anthropic at $14B at the end of December 2024, after agreeing to invest $8B in Anthropic so far  —  - The value of Amazon's investments in Anthropic have soared.  — Amazon has agreed to invest $8 billion in Anthropic so far.

Francisco Rodrigues / CoinDesk: DefiLlama: Bybit experienced a “bank run” of over $4B after the ~$1.5B hack, leading to a ~$5.5B total outflow; CEO says “about 50%” of funds were withdrawn  —  Major cryptocurrency exchange Bybit has seen total outflows of over $5.5 billion after it suffered …

Kendra Barnett / Adweek: X is rolling out Grok-powered AI tools for advertisers to generate ready-to-use ad copy and imagery and provide campaign performance analysis  —  The company is betting on AI to help recover some of the millions it has shed in ad revenue over the last two years

Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security: An investigation details how Chinese cybercrime groups are turning phished payment card data into new Apple or Google wallets for online and in-store use  —  Carding — the underground business of stealing, selling and swiping stolen payment card data — has long been the dominion of Russia-based hackers.

David Yaffe-Bellany / New York Times: Even as Trump embraces crypto, attracting millions of new investors, the Bybit hack and memecoins show how crypto remains the wild West of the financial world  —  Hours after Coinbase said the S.E.C. was dropping a lawsuit against it, another major cryptocurrency exchange reported a potentially record-setting theft.