About: blatcho

This AI-enabled device can identify the species around your home by their songs and alert you when new ones arrive.

You can rest easy knowing you’re saving money on some top-notch gadgets.

Financial Times: Sources: BeReal is exploring adding paid features to avoid advertising; the app now has 15M DAUs, up from 10K in March 2021, and is now valued at ~$600M  —  Photo-sharing app BeReal is exploring the addition of in-app payments for extra features to avoid Instagram-style advertising …

Natasha Singer / New York Times: Some experts say targeted ads on streaming services could be crucial in the 2022 US midterms, as others worry the ads evade federal regulation and oversight  —  Over the last few weeks, tens of thousands of voters in the Detroit area who watch streaming video services were shown different […]

Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg: After Ethereum’s Merge, a look at four more upgrades to the network that are under active development, called The Surge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge  —  After much celebration over the successful transition of Ethereum, the question remains what’s next for the most commercially-significant crypto project.

An alleged teen hacker claims to have gained deep access to the company’s systems, but the full picture of the breach is still coming into focus.

The film—a trans coming-of-age allegory—was pulled from the Toronto International Film Festival over “rights issues.”

Svea Herbst-Bayliss / Reuters: Filing: Starboard Value has built a 9% stake in Wix, which has been struggling with losses since Q4 2021 and has adopted a three-year cost-cutting program  —  Starboard Value LP has built a 9% stake in website development platform Wix.com Ltd (WIX.O), the activist hedge fund disclosed in a regulatory filing […]

Andrew Cunningham / Ars Technica: EVGA stops making video cards, citing conflicts with Nvidia and ending a partnership started in 1999; Nvidia’s GeForce reportedly makes up 80% of EVGA’s revenue  —  EVGA will continue selling current-gen GeForce cards until it runs out of stock.  —  Graphics card manufacturer eVGA …

Joe Schneider / Bloomberg: A US federal appeals court upholds the Texas social media content moderation law, lifting an injunction that blocked it and remanding it back to the lower court  —  A federal appeals court upheld the validity of a Texas social-media law that companies like Twitter Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc …

A smart way of putting together lots of nanogenerators that exploit static electricity to generate a current could open up a new kind of wave power

Two MIT scientists from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) are among this year’s winners of the Ig Nobel Prize, the satiric award celebrating “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” BCS professor Edward “Ted” Gibson and graduate student Eric Martinez, along with former MIT visiting researcher Francis Mollica, […]

Professor Hal Abelson has dedicated his career to making information technology more accessible to all and empowering people — kids, in particular — through computer science. But his storied career in computer science began with Abelson coming to MIT in 1969 to pursue his interest in mathematics. “The thing I like to remind students of […]

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: General Atlantic to buy out SoftBank’s entire 15% stake in game-based online learning service Kahoot for about $152M; SoftBank spent $215M+ for the stake  —  SoftBank’s retreat from its past investing exuberance continues apace.  This morning, Kahoot, the Norwegian startup that provides …

Dustin Volz / Wall Street Journal: US DOJ forms the Digital Asset Coordinators Network with 150+ federal prosecutors across the country to target illegal activities involving digital currencies  —  New effort is part of trend toward putting more resources to target illegal activities involving digital currencies

Financial Times: Sources: UK’s new PM Liz Truss is planning a last-ditch bid to persuade SoftBank to list Arm in London, pushing for talks after the Queen’s mourning period  —  UK prime minister to push for talks with Japanese owner of British tech company  —  Prime Minister Liz Truss and chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng …

A preliminary agreement prevented a total shutdown, but many supply chains still face delays and disruption caused by staff shortages.

These are tantalizing hints that microbes might have lived on Mars billions of years ago, but scientists need to study the rocks back on Earth to be sure.

The Russian blockade and bombardments are cutting off thousands of tons of grain, threatening the food supply in countries that rely on wheat exports.

Casey Newton / Platformer: Source: Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox directed the New Product Experimentation division to scale back and focus entirely on short-form video innovation  —  Facebook’s New Product Experimentation division is scaling back its mission dramatically, Platformer has learned.

The Information: Memo to staff: Adam Mosseri says Instagram’s creator surveys show the app lags behind TikTok and YouTube on the most important creator satisfaction dimensions  —  For the past couple of years, as Instagram has sought to better compete with TikTok, becoming more appealing to creators has been a top priority.

Sandali Handagama / CoinDesk: Chainalysis: emerging markets, led by Vietnam and the Philippines, drove global cryptocurrency adoption over the past year; China remained active despite a ban  —  The blockchain analytics firm’s 2022 Global Crypto Adoption Index also shows China remains active despite a ban on crypto trading.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and their ilk were meant to let us chat freely in a digital public square, but the firms running social media are just as corporate as old media, says Annalee Newitz

If you have a LinkedIn account, your connections probably consist of a core group of people you know well, and a larger set of people you know less well. The latter are what experts call “weak ties.” Now a unique, large-scale experiment co-directed by an MIT scholar shows that on LinkedIn, those weak ties are […]

Swirling around the planet’s equator, the rings of Saturn are a dead giveaway that the planet is spinning at a tilt. The belted giant rotates at a 26.7-degree angle relative to the plane in which it orbits the sun. Astronomers have long suspected that this tilt comes from gravitational interactions with its neighbor Neptune, as […]

Say you live across from a bakery. Sometimes you are hungry, and therefore tempted when odors waft through your window, but other times satiety makes you indifferent. Sometimes popping over for a popover seems trouble-free, but sometimes your spiteful ex is there. Your brain balances many influences in determining what you’ll do. A new MIT […]

You don’t stay in business for generations without diversifying.

Today’s algorithms still largely lack empathy, ethics, and the ability to see the bigger picture.

“The power of being an outsider is you are constantly building your own alternative.”

This week, we talk about the Sony PSVR2, the still-secret next Meta headset, and how virtual reality technology needs to improve to earn mainstream acceptance.

Laura Cappelle / New York Times: French director Marion Siéfert blames Meta’s policies for banning livestreams of her “Instagram play” about teenage sexuality, even though it contains no nudity  —  Marion Siéfert’s “_jeanne_dark_,” about a shy teenager beginning to express her sexuality …

Bloomberg: Sources: Adobe plans to acquire UI design and prototyping tool Figma, which could be announced as early as today; one source values the deal at $15B  —  Adobe Inc. is nearing a deal to acquire Figma, a startup that makes online design collaboration tools, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Casey Newton / Platformer: TikTok and ByteDance’s links to China mean wrongdoing will be punished more harshly in the US than Meta and Twitter, no matter how “transparent” the company is  —  In new testimony to Congress, the company faces stern questions on China  —  Ever since TikTok became …

A simulation consisting of 27 AIs representing different regions in climate negotiations is part of a competition to find out which policies and incentives could have the best chances of success

Over 17 years, YouTube has transformed from a place to share home videos to a cultural juggernaut that helps elect presidents. A new book from Mark Bergen gives unparalleled insights into the platform’s rise

Pharmaceutical companies make some remarkable advances. Could they make significantly more of them? It’s possible, but for that to happen, the industry would likely have to change some of its core habits, according to the research of Danielle Li, an associate professor of economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In a recent paper, […]

Peiter “Mudge” Zatko’s allegations about the social media platform renewed a sense of urgency for lawmakers to rein in Big Tech.

Your old earbuds might not be cutting it for school or work. Here are some nice discounts on WIRED-tested favorites.

At a high-profile meeting in Geneva, international negotiators are moving closer toward developing rules for space actors in low Earth orbit and beyond.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Intel, Arm, and Nvidia propose a new open, license-free specification with 8-bit floating point, or FP8, precision as a common interchange format for AI  —  In pursuit of faster and more efficient AI system development, Intel, Arm and Nvidia today published a draft specification for what they refer …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Tel Aviv-based Groundcover, a performance monitoring service for cloud apps, raised a $20M Series A led by Zeev Ventures, bringing its total funding to $24.5M  —  Groundcover, a performance monitoring platform for cloud apps, today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A round led …

David Pan / Bloomberg: Ethermine, the largest Ethereum mining firm, will shut down its servers for miners after Ethereum’s Merge, switching its mining pool to withdraw-only mode  —  Ethermine, the largest Ethereum mining services provider by computing power, will shut down its servers for miners after the blockchain completes its historic technical upgrade.

These four alternatives to the newsletter platform offer just as many—if not more—features, and can be easier on your wallet.

WIRED talked to Jane Jensen about her prolific publishing, shape-shifting dogs, and the hope of seeing Gabriel Knight 4.

Sony’s first virtual reality device in six years arrives in 2023. Here’s a preview of the PSVR2, and the games that will run on it.

The Verge: PlayStation VR2 hands-on: easy to set up, a joy to use, the OLED display looks great, refreshed Sense controllers are an improvement, gameplay is fun, and more  —  And it’s pretty good … Sony’s PlayStation VR2 may not be coming out until next year, but after months of drip-feeding news …

Todd Spangler / Variety: Denmark-based Podimo, a subscription service for podcasts and audiobooks, raised €58.6M led by 83North, Highland, and Saban, bringing its total funding to €162M  —  Listen up: Podimo, the Denmark-based subscription service for podcasts and audiobooks, said it secured €58.6 million …

Wall Street Journal: Sources: after its funds performed poorly, SoftBank considers launching a third Vision Fund; Vision Fund 2 is now worth 19% less than the $49B invested  —  Despite massive losses, Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son has tried to chart a new path for the tech investment giant

Betar Gallant, MIT associate professor and Class of 1922 Career Development Chair in Mechanical Engineering, grew up in a curious, independently minded family. Her mother had multiple jobs over the years, including in urban planning and in the geospatial field. Her father, although formally trained in English, read textbooks of all kinds from cover to […]

Brady Dale / Axios: The US Treasury clarifies its guidance on Tornado Cash and provides a way for users to lawfully withdraw their funds by applying for a license  —  New guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control provides a roadmap for people who used Tornado Cash for lawful transactions to […]