About: blatcho

Peter Kafka / Vox: Q&A with ex-Facebook CSO and Stanford Internet Observatory professor Alex Stamos on overestimating mis- and disinformation’s impact, Brazil, Gamergate, and more  —  “Resist trying to make things better”: A conversation with internet security expert Alex Stamos.

Reuters: Crypto prices are recovering in January so far: bitcoin is up 26%, including 22% in the past week, to over $20,000, ether is up 29%, and meme coins are rising  —  Bitcoin is on the charge in 2023, dragging the crypto market off the floor and electrifying bonk, a new meme coin.

Patrick McGee / Financial Times: How Apple built a supply chain in China over two decades, spending billions and embedding staff in factories, creating a dependence before US tensions escalated  —  The company spent two decades and billions of dollars building a supply chain of unprecedented sophistication.  Now, a reckoning is coming

Security researchers who find a flaw in software normally privately inform the developers of it in the hope of prompting a fix, but now a mathematical trick can let them apply public pressure without releasing dangerous details of the bug

Need an ultrafast drive for video editing or a rugged option to back up your photos in the field? We’ve got a solution for every situation.

Video editing gets a lot faster when you’ve got a wheel.

One year later, researchers are marveling at the power of the Hunga Tonga explosion—and wondering how to monitor hundreds of other undersea volcanoes.

Dylan Patel / SemiAnalysis: An overview of the ML software development industry over the past decade: a decline of Nvidia’s CUDA monopoly, PyTorch overtaking Google’s TensorFlow, and more  —  Over the last decade, the landscape of machine learning software development has undergone significant changes.

William Mauldin / Wall Street Journal: Russian attacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid are straining its mobile network, leading to a global hunt for equipment like batteries to keep the system online  —  Telecom operators and internet providers scour suppliers for better batteries, generators  —  Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid …

Sapna Maheshwari / New York Times: Some US universities, including Alabama’s Auburn University and the University of Oklahoma, are banning TikTok on their Wi-Fi networks, annoying some students  —  The school’s prohibition brings a geopolitical fight front and center for TikTok’s biggest fans: young Americans.

Habits, tools, and tactics that will help you deliver results.

Three strategies, based on interviews with 37 senior leaders.

Innovative approaches that your company may not have considered.

To succeed in home settings, domestic mechanical assistants will need humanoid attributes.

By reinstating banned accounts and selling blue checks, Musk has supercharged “the most dangerous” Covid disinformation.

Cupertino puts privacy first in a lot of its products. But the company still gathers a bunch of your information.

Ezra Reguerra / Cointelegraph: After North Korea’s Lazarus Group moved ~41K ETH, worth ~$63.5M, stolen from the Harmony bridge hack, Binance and Huobi freeze 124 BTC linked to the hackers  —  In a recent tweet, on-chain crypto detective ZachXBT said that the hackers have been moving $64 million in the last weekend.  —  75 Total […]

Bloomberg: Taiwanese government data: integrated circuit chip exports rose 18.4% YoY in 2022, down from 27.1% YoY growth in 2021 and 22% YoY growth in 2020  —  Taiwan’s exports of integrated circuit chips rose in 2022 for a seventh consecutive year, further solidifying the economy’s leadership status …

Shaurya Malwa / CoinDesk: Shiba Inu developers plan to launch Shibarium, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, in the coming weeks, focusing on the metaverse and gaming applications  —  Ecosystem tokens shiba inu, leash and bone will serve as the the upcoming Ethereum-based blockchain.  —  Upcoming layer 2 network Shibarium …

Get help, even if you’re off the grid.

Add some color to your life, find accent lighting to match your mood, and transform the feel of your home with these decorative devices.

In his senior year of high school, Daniel Larsen proved a key theorem about Carmichael numbers—strange entities that mimic the primes.

Morgan Meaker / Wired: Europe’s rapid delivery market has consolidated down to three companies: Getir, the largest player that operates in seven European countries, Flink, and Gopuff  —  Rapid grocery delivery apps are leaving the continent, putting the Turkish startup on top.  But, its reign is anything but stable.

Hana Kiros / MIT Technology Review: A look at VR support groups and communities helping members process cancer diagnoses and death, question their marriages, turn over childhood traumas, and more  —  Welcome to “Death Q&A,” a space with a unique combination of anonymity and togetherness, where avatars discuss what weighs on them most heavily.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Touchscreen Macs will help Apple further unify its software and services, keep up with a touch-first generation, and pick up a bigger piece of the PC market  —  Apple’s upcoming move to Macs with touch screens is about the future of its user base.  Also: The company kicks its in-house technology […]

Billy Perrigo / TIME: A profile of, and interview with, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on AGI, “not moving fast and breaking things”, launching the Sparrow chatbot in 2023, and more  —  Demis Hassabis stands halfway up a spiral staircase, surveying the cathedral he built.

Financial Times: TikTok, Instagram, and other social media platforms expect age verification measures in the UK’s Online Safety Bill to reduce user numbers, hitting ad revenue  —  UK’s Online Safety Bill requires stronger age verification measures for platforms including TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat

Coco Feng / South China Morning Post: China’s central bank says Ant Group and 13 other firms “have basically completed business rectification” under financial regulators’ guidance and supervision  —  Chinese financial technology giant Ant Group and 13 other platform companies “have basically completed business rectification” …

Plus: Samsung sets a date for the next Galaxy Unpacked, Xbox gets a power-saving mode, and the right-to-repair fight rages on.

It’s the indispensable multi-tool of the kitchen. We sliced and diced our way through meats and veggies to find today’s best blades.

Plus: Joe Biden’s classified-documents scandal, the end of security support for Windows 7, and more.

Erin Woo / The Information: Internal messages: Twitter intentionally suspended access to third-party clients last Thursday; staff questioned when an explanation will be provided publicly  —  The mysterious outage of Tweetbot and other third-party Twitter clients that began Thursday night was an intentional suspension …

Wall Street Journal: SIA says chip companies proposed 40+ projects across the US worth ~$200B since 2020, as the US realizes that chips are now as central to modern economies as oil  —  Recent shortages and fears of China’s ambitions to dominate the industry have led to a frenetic effort to rev up U.S. production

Washington Post: How Elon Musk’s Twitter moderation cuts boosted hate speech outside the US and Canada, where 75%+ of the service’s 280M DAUs live, including in Japan and India  —  With 75 percent of its audience outside the U.S. and Canada, the impact of Elon Musk’s moderation cuts has been great elsewhere

Machine learning has already proven useful, but its real-world applications are just beginning.

These great discounts will help you start the year right.

Adam Popescu / MIT Technology Review: A look at Congo’s Virunga National Park, which is running a Bitcoin mine that uses power from a hydro plant to pay salaries and build infrastructure projects  —  In an attempt to protect its forests and famous wildlife, Virunga has become the first national park to run a Bitcoin […]

Nitish Pahwa / Slate: How All-In, a podcast moderated by Jason Calacanis and his billionaire pals that often tops tech-podcast charts, gives an insight into Twitter under Elon Musk  —  On Nov. 7, about a week after Elon Musk took over Twitter and laid off half the staff, a company vice president offered a group […]

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica: Hackers are exploiting a critical remote code execution vulnerability in unpatched versions of the Control Web Panel, a widely used interface for web hosting  —  A patch was released in October, but not all servers have installed it.  —  Malicious hackers have begun exploiting …

The state is ping-ponging between severe drought and catastrophic flooding. The solution to both? Making the landscape spongier.

Writer Warren Lapine’s latest project is a collection of letters Roger Zelazny wrote to his friend Carl Yoke.

Far from ushering in the death of cinema, AI can help film the “unfilmable” and make cinema more collaborative.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: DOJ cleared its antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter to oversee probes involving Google; Google had sought his recusal, citing his work with Yelp and others  —  Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter’s involvement had been paused and the Alphabet unit sought his recusal

Victoria Song / The Verge: Strava users say the rollout of its first price hike in over a decade has been unnecessarily convoluted and confusing  —  No one likes price hikes, but Strava’s messy rollout has left many customers wondering what’s happening to their subscription.  Here’s what’s actually happening …

David Pan / Bloomberg: With the value of next-gen Bitcoin mining rigs down an estimated 85%, some crypto lenders flooded with repossessed rigs are keeping them running for the income  —  Crypto lenders have repossessed so many Bitcoin mining rigs they’re resorting to plugging them in and extracting tokens themselves.

Levels of respiratory illness are rising in the Boston area and elsewhere. Here, MIT Medical Director Cecilia Stuopis provides recommendations for keeping yourself and others healthy during the winter months. Q: Rates of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses are back on the rise. Should I be concerned? A: While everyone should take additional precautions, people […]

A framework to help funders understand who they are and what kind of impact they aspire to have.

Small tweaks can make a big impact.

A program paid workers $10,000 to relocate to Tulsa. And two recent studies suggest the investment was worth it.

The loquacious bot has Microsoft ready to sink a reported $10 billion into OpenAI. It’s unclear what products can be built on the technology.