~techmeme | Bookmarks (999)

Keith Bradsher / New York Times: China, the leading producer of rare minerals, has made it harder in recent weeks for foreign companies, particularly chip makers, to buy such materials in China  —  Already the dominant producer of rare minerals, Beijing is using export restrictions and its power over state-owned companies to further control access.

John Gruber / Daring Fireball: Estimated Vision Pro 2024 sales are only slightly less than the reported peak production capacity, implying sales are almost in line with Apple's expectations  —  Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas — here's Techmeme's roundup of summaries and regurgitations) …

David Morris / Bloomberg: Chinese self-driving company WeRide's shares closed up 6.8% at $16.55, giving it a market cap of ~$4.5B, after raising $440.5M in a US IPO and private placement  —  The Guangzhou-based company's ADS pared initial gains to close at $16.55 on Friday in New York, above the IPO price of $15.50 apiece.

Associated Press: Engineers, developers, and researchers say OpenAI's transcription tool Whisper hallucinates chunks of text or even entire sentences, including racial commentary  —  Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.”

Bloomberg: Accel registers with the US SEC as an investment adviser to tap private markets, joining Sequoia, a16z, Bessemer, and other VC firms that made a similar move  —  - Firm is transforming from VC to registered investment adviser  — VC firm will be able to buy more discounted secondary stakes

Emily Mullin / Wired: Brain-computer interface company Science Corporation says its retinal implant, which has a 2mm chip, let some blind people read, play cards, and recognize faces  —  Science Corporation's retinal implant allowed some people who lost their central vision to read, play cards, and recognize faces.

Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes: Nooks, whose AI tools can analyze sales calls and summarize customer interactions, raised a $43M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins at a $285M valuation  —  Founded by three Stanford roommates, Nooks has raised $43 million in funding to build tools for automating laborious sales tasks.

David Shepardson / Reuters: Delta sues CrowdStrike, saying the July 19 outage caused mass flight cancellations, disrupted travel plans of 1.3M customers, and cost the carrier over $500M  —  Delta Air Lines (DAL.N) on Friday sued cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike (CRWD.O) in a Georgia state court after a global outage …

Christopher Yasiejko / Bloomberg Law: A US federal jury awards Apple $250, finding that Masimo's smartwatches infringed Apple Watch design patents; Apple sought statutory minimum damages  —  Apple Inc. v. Masimo Corp. (D. Del., 22-cv-1377)  —  Apple Inc. v. Masimo Corp. (D. Del., 22-cv-1378)  —  Search by Law Firm Search by Topic Search by Company

Sean Hollister / The Verge: The US Copyright Office denies a request from video game preservationists to let libraries, archives, and museums lend games via remote access for study  —  When video game scholars want to study games that are no longer on sale, they sometimes have to drive hours to do it legally — and that won't be changing anytime soon.

Alex Heath / The Verge: Sources: Google is aiming to release its Gemini 2.0 model in December; the model isn't showing the performance gains the Demis Hassabis-led team had hoped for  —  The AI race is heating up just in time for winter.  —  As my colleagues Kylie Robison and Tom Warren reported …

Kevin Mclaughlin / The Information: Source: Perplexity CEO told staff in 2023 that it had acquisition offers from X, OpenAI, and Notion, in the $150M to $200M range; Microsoft was also interested  —  Aravind Srinivas didn't set out to earn a reputation as one of the media's biggest tech villains.  It just kind of happened.

Christopher Beam / The Atlantic: A profile of Mike Solana, a Peter Thiel protégé whose Pirate Wires newsletter and podcast became popular among “anti-woke” tech figures since the “techlash”  —  Mike solana has opinions.  Here are a few of them: Building stuff is good.

New York Times: Sources: Chinese hackers targeted data from phones of Trump and JD Vance, via a hack of Verizon systems; staff members of Harris' campaign were also targeted  —  The targeting of the Republican presidential ticket's phones is part of what appears to be a wide-ranging effort to gather information about American leaders.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: federal prosecutors are investigating Tether for possible violations of sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules; US Treasury is considering sanctions  —  Authorities looking at possible violations of anti-money-laundering and sanctions rules  —  The federal government …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: OpenAI says it won't release a model called Orion this year  —  OpenAI says that it doesn't intend to release an AI model code-named Orion this year, countering recent reporting from The Verge on the AI company's roadmap.  —  “We don't have plans to release a model code-named Orion this year,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch via email.

Financial Times: Insight and Info: China's leading EDA companies for chip design, Empyrean Technology, Primarius, and Semitronix, had less than 2% of global market share in 2023  —  Beijing pushes for a bigger share of the crucial electronic design automation market  —  Chinese companies are struggling …

Omkar Godbole / CoinDesk: Glassnode data shows the number of bitcoin whales, network entities holding at least 1,000 bitcoin, has jumped to 1,678, the highest level since January 2021  —  Protocol Village: Blockchain Key Manager Cubist, Led by Carnegie Mellon Prof, Launches Bridge-Security System ‘Bascule’

Financial Times: Secondhand fashion site Vinted raised €340M led by TPG at a €5B valuation, as the profitable startup plans to expand beyond clothes into electronics and more  —  Latest TPG-backed funding round values profitable Lithuanian start-up at €5bn  —  Second-hand fashion site Vinted plans …

Bloomberg: Crypto super PAC Fairshake, a rare bipartisan PAC, plans to deploy $40M+ in the final weeks of the 2024 US elections, after already deploying $140M  —  Fairshake is the rare political action committee that is backing both Democrats and Republicans — as long as they take crypto seriously.

Reuters: Document: Guangzhou, China-based self-driving startup WeRide files for a Nasdaq IPO, planning to raise up to $119.4M  —  Chinese self-driving startup WeRide has filed for a $119.4 million initial public offering on Nasdaq and a private placement of $320.5 million, according to a term sheet seen by Reuters on Wednesday.

Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer: Fortinet discloses a critical FortiManager API flaw being exploited in 0-day attacks to steal sensitive files, after warning customers privately over a week ago  —  Fortinet publicly disclosed today a critical FortiManager API vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-47575, that was exploited …

Stephen Nellis / Reuters: Hugging Face announces an open source software offering aimed at lowering costs for building chatbots and AI tools, in partnership with AWS, Google, and others  —  Hugging Face on Wednesday said it is releasing a new open-source software offering with Amazon.com (AMZN.O), Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Fixify, which combines AI and human analysts to identify and fix IT problems, raised a $25M Series A co-led by Costanoa, Decibel, and Paladin Capital  —  Matt Peters has spent more than a decade working for cybersecurity vendors.  He was a team lead at Check Point, climbed the corporate ladder …