~techmeme | Bookmarks (1039)

James Reddick / The Record: Sophos researchers find “crude”, cheap ransomware tools being sold on the dark web, enabling inexperienced freelancers to easily launch attacks  —  Cheap ransomware is being sold for one-time use on dark web forums, allowing inexperienced freelancers to get into cybercrime without any interaction with affiliates.

Wall Street Journal: Internal draft: UK's ICO says Google's Privacy Sandbox falls short and leaves gaps that can be exploited to undermine privacy of users who should be anonymous  —  The Information Commissioner's Office said in a draft report that Google's proposed replacements for cookies have gaps that advertisers can exploit.

Raffaele Huang / Wall Street Journal: Apple removes WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China, saying it was ordered to do so by China's cyberspace officials citing national security concerns  —  China's cyberspace officials cite national-security concerns for targeting the Meta apps, Apple says

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Washington, DC-based Cape, which is developing a mobile service that doesn't ask for customers' personal data, raised a $40M Series B co-led by A-Star and a16z  —  AT&T's recent mega customer data breach — 74 million accounts affected — laid bare how much data carriers have on their users …

Ryan Morrison / Tom's Guide: Microsoft researchers introduce VASA-1, an AI model that creates a realistic talking face video from a portrait photo and an audio file, in research preview  —  Impressive lip-syncing  —  A new AI research paper from Microsoft promises a future where you can upload a photo …

Dwarkesh Patel / Dwarkesh Podcast: Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg on Llama 3, buying H100 GPUs for Reels, AGI, energy constraints, dangers of open source, the metaverse, Meta's custom silicon, and more  —  Caeser Augustus, intelligence explosion, bioweapons, $10b models, & much more  —  Mark Zuckerberg on:  — Llama 3

Bloomberg: Digital marketing software company Ibotta closes up 17% at $103.25 per share in its trading debut, after raising ~$577.3M in an IPO priced above marketed range  —  - Founder and CEO Leach to have 71% of the voting power  — Digital marketing firm's backers include Koch Industries arm

Zaheer Kachwala / Reuters: Google says it will consolidate teams that focus on building AI models across Research and DeepMind, and move its Responsible AI teams in Research to DeepMind  —  Alphabet-owned Google (GOOGL.O) said on Thursday it would consolidate teams that focus on building artificial intelligence models across …

Kris Holt / Engadget: Meta cuts the price of the base 128GB Quest 2 from $249 to $199, its second permanent price cut in four months, after a drop from $299 to $249 in January  —  The base 128GB headset will cost $199 from now on.  —  For the second time this year, Meta has given the Quest 2 a permanent price cut.

Todd Spangler / Variety: Netflix won't report subscriber numbers or Average Revenue per Membership starting in Q1 2025, saying time spent is its “best proxy for customer satisfaction”  —  Netflix will no longer report subscriber numbers — a key metric for streaming services for years — beginning with the first quarter of 2025.

Sarah Whitten / CNBC: Netflix reports Q1 revenue up 15% YoY to $9.37B, vs. $9.28B est., paid users up 16% YoY to 269.6M, vs. 264.2M est., and net income $2.3B, up from $1.3B YoY  —  LOS ANGELES — Netflix reported earnings that beat on the top and bottom line after the bell Thursday.  —  Here are the results:

Emilia David / The Verge: Meta claims both Llama 3 models beat similarly sized models like Gemini, Mistral, and Claude 3 on certain benchmarks; humans marked Llama 3 higher than GPT-3.5  —  Llama 3 currently features two model weights, with 8B and 70B parameters.  (The B is for billions and represents how complex …

Crystal Kim / Axios: A US jury finds Avraham Eisenberg, a crypto trader who stole $110M on the Mango Markets exchange in 2022, guilty of fraud despite his “code is law” claim  —  - He used the inflated futures holdings as collateral to borrow other cryptocurrencies on the platform …

Daniel Tencer / Music Business Worldwide: Short-form video app Triller is merging with Hong Kong financial services company AGBA; Triller shareholders will own 80% of the combined company valued at $4B  —  Financially troubled social media app and TikTok competitor Triller is merging with a Hong Kong financial services company …

Emma Roth / The Verge: DARPA reveals that an AI-controlled X-62A jet successfully faced a human pilot in an F-16 during an in-air dogfight test carried out in 2023  —  The US Air Force is putting AI in the pilot's seat.  In an update on Thursday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) …

Scott Chipolina / Financial Times: Crypto miners are stockpiling bitcoins ahead of April 20 halving; TheMinerMag: Marathon Digital, CleanSpark, and Bitfarms hoarded ~$2B worth of bitcoins  —  Digital assets market prepares for 50% drop in reward for verifying bitcoin transactions  —  Cryptocurrency miners …

Sheila Chiang / CNBC: TSMC reports Q1 revenue up 16.5% YoY to NT$592.64B ($18.87B) vs. NT$582.94B est., profit up 8.9% YoY to NT$225.49B vs. NT$213.59B est., on strong AI chip demand  —  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company on Thursday beat revenue and profit expectations in the first quarter …

Molly White / Citation Needed: An experiment with LLMs: the tools are helpful in mundane ways but you can't build a hundred-billion-dollar industry around a technology that's kind of useful  —  AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a “kind of useful” tool justifies the harm.  —  /1311.164082  —  1×

Michael Peel / Financial Times: Research suggests GPT-4 surpassed or achieved the same scores as all but top-scoring specialist medics in assessing ocular problems and suggesting treatments  —  Research harnesses power of generative artificial intelligence in latest sign of its potential use in medicine

Thomas Barrabi / New York Post: Google fires 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the company's New York and Sunnyvale offices to protest its business ties with Israel  —  Google has fired 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the search giant's offices in New York and Sunnyvale …

CNBC: AWS discontinues its Snowmobile service, an 18-wheeler truck introduced in 2016 to help customers transport large amounts of on-premises data to AWS facilities  —  Amazon Web Services Snowmobile Truck  —  At Amazon's annual cloud conference in 2016, the company captured the crowd's attention by driving an 18-wheeler onstage.

Rolfe Winkler / Wall Street Journal: Filing: 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki is seeking to take the company private after three years in public markets that saw its valuation collapse from a high of $6B  —  The DNA-testing company's shares closed at a new low on Wednesday  —  Anne Wojcicki is seeking to take her DNA-testing company

Amy Or / Bloomberg: Walmart-backed digital marketing software company Ibotta raises ~$577.3M in its IPO at a share price of $88, giving it a market value of $2.67B  —  - Walmart-backed digital marketer's shares priced at $88 each  — Number of shares offered was increased to 6.56 million

Mackenzie Hawkins / Bloomberg: Sources: Micron could get $6B+ in chip grants from the US Commerce Department for domestic factory projects; the award could be announced as soon as next week  —  - Top US memory-chip maker building factories in Idaho, New York  — Awards were previously announced for Intel, TSMC and Samsung