About: blatcho

Elon Musk’s plan to make users pay for verification won’t turn it into a status symbol. It’ll just ruin the blue check’s appeal.

Wall Street Journal: General Mills and Audi paused Twitter ads, and sources say Pfizer and Mondelez have as well, as concern over content moderation grows  —  Advertisers are concerned about a flurry of executive departures at Twitter and new owner Elon Musk’s plans for content moderation

Casey Newton / Platformer: Sources: Twitter’s newsletter platform Revue, acquired in early 2021, is scheduled to close by the end of the year, and its Notes product has been paused  —  A new Vine camera is in.  Notes and Revue are out  —  With massive layoffs expected to hit Twitter tomorrow, on Thursday employees once […]

Jordan Novet / CNBC: Twilio reports Q3 revenue up 33% YoY to $983M, vs. $972.2M est., 280K+ active customer accounts, and Q4 revenue guidance below estimates; the stock drops 15%+  —  – Twilio’s quarterly revenue projection was softer than analysts had been looking for.  — The company added about 5,000 active customer accounts in the […]

The accelerometers in our smartphones collect information as we travel over bridges, and this can reveal if the structure is weakening and help us know when to fix it to extend its life

The US military has spent billions of dollars on spy satellites and supersonic surveillance aircraft, but now it seems to be focusing on slow, lightweight solar-powered planes to do the same job

One of the smallest and mightiest organisms on the planet is a plant-like bacterium known to marine biologists as Prochlorococcus. The green-tinted microbe measures less than a micron across, and its populations suffuse through the upper layers of the ocean, where a single teaspoon of seawater can hold millions of the tiny organisms. Prochlorococcus grows […]

Want to know if the Golden Gate Bridge is holding up well? There could be an app for that. A new study involving MIT researchers shows that mobile phones placed in vehicles, equipped with special software, can collect useful structural integrity data while crossing bridges. In so doing, they could become a less expensive alternative […]

Academic digital credentials — the cryptographically verifiable assertion that an individual holds a degree, certificate, or other credential — have been available for the better part of a decade. Yet despite the potential value of these data-rich, transportable credentials to graduates, employers, and academic institutions, digital credentials have by no means become the standard in […]

The connection between purpose and performance is real. And it starts at the top.

Whether you dropped the ball on a project or got a bad performance review, these five psychology-backed strategies can help you move forward.

People prefer a personalized message — but are also skeptical of how companies use their data. Here’s how to thread the needle.

The US and Europe can learn a lot from startups that are nimbler, more digitized, and potentially better at serving underserved people.

This week, we discuss possible consequences of Elon Musk’s shakeup at the social media platform he now owns.

Chemists have long conceptualized tiny machines that could fabricate drugs, plastics, and other polymers that are hard to build with bigger tools.

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters: Sources: the EU plans light-touch rules for Airbnb and other rental companies, including providing data on usership, in a bid to unify laws across the bloc  —  Airbnb (ABNB.O) and other short-term home rental companies will have to provide data on numbers using their services and how many nights …

Chloe Chaplain / The i Paper: Source: the UK plans to remove the Online Safety Bill’s controversial “legal but harmful” content rules, leaving them only for material targeted at children  —  EXCLUSIVEThe Bill is due to be brought back to Parliament later this month after it was delayed over the summer

Josh Ye / Reuters: Lenovo reports Q2 revenue down 4% YoY to $17.09B, above estimates, the first decline in 10 quarters as pandemic-fueled global PC demand weakens  —  China’s Lenovo Group (0992.HK) reported its first revenue decline in 10 quarters as a pandemic-fuelled computer sales boom comes to an end …

A chemical gel can reveal a secret sequence of numbers if given the right “password” – a combination of heat, light and water. The technology could be used to prevent counterfeiting or in smart labels

Teaching a machine to recognize human actions has many potential applications, such as automatically detecting workers who fall at a construction site or enabling a smart home robot to interpret a user’s gestures. To do this, researchers train machine-learning models using vast datasets of video clips that show humans performing actions. However, not only is […]

For years, the platform has funded a project that’s meant to create a better, decentralized online experience. Now Twitter’s new owner will decide its future.

Give your favorite explorer a present they’ll cherish forever, from hardcore camp stoves to tiny tents for their cat.

Rust makes it impossible to introduce some of the most common security vulnerabilities. And its adoption can’t come soon enough.

Josh Sisco / Politico: Sources: the US DOJ is preparing to open an in-depth probe into Adobe’s $20B takeover of Figma and has been contacting customers, competitors, and investors  —  The DOJ’s investigation is the latest sign of heavy scrutiny on tech dealmaking.  —  The Justice Department is preparing to open …

Kate Irwin / Decrypt: Meta is letting select Instagram US creators test a toolkit for minting NFTs and selling them on and off the platform, and says it won’t charge fees until 2024  —  Instagram will soon have NFT creation and trading tools built in, but in-app purchases will be “subject to applicable app store […]

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Qualcomm expects to provide modem chips for the “vast majority” of iPhones in 2023, retaining its current foothold after previously planning to supply ~20%  —  Qualcomm Inc. will continue to provide the modem chips for the “vast majority” of iPhones in 2023 …

An retrofitted Black Hawk helicopter flew autonomously between mountains to deliver blood supplies in a simulated mission. It also picked up a simulated medical casualty

Taiwan is where most of the world’s high-tech chips are made. Demand for the components is increasing, as is the associated environmental cost

Birdwatch, an attempt to tackle misinformation on Twitter by providing additional context to false claims in tweets, appears to be working – but the project may no longer be a priority under Elon Musk’s leadership

Cancer is characterized by a number of key biological processes known as the “hallmarks of cancer,” which remodel cells and their immediate environment so that tumors can form, grow, and thrive. Many of these changes are mediated by specific genes and proteins, working in tandem with other cellular processes, but the specifics vary from cancer […]

One of the most notable climate change provisions in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act is the first U.S. federal tax on a greenhouse gas (GHG). That the fee targets methane (CH4), rather than carbon dioxide (CO2), emissions is indicative of the urgency the scientific community has placed on reducing this short-lived but powerful gas. Methane […]

Many organizations fail to adequately prepare leaders for — or support them in — this critical part of the job.

A simple approach to boost customers’ visibility into how a garment was made.

Applying these to key decision points will help you hire, develop, and retain talent more equitably.

The company says the Apple Watch’s ovulation-tracking tech isn’t birth control. But the public doesn’t necessarily know how to use that information safely.

Certain Pantone collections now require users to pay $15 a month to access them—with colors turned black unless you pay up.

Underwater cables keep the internet online. When they congregate in one place, things get tricky.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Redwood City-based Alation, which helps crawl and search enterprise databases, raised a $123M Series E at a $1.7B valuation, bringing its total funding to $340M  —  There’s been an explosion of enterprise data in recent years, accelerated by pandemic-spurred digital transformations.

Karen Hao / Wall Street Journal: China’s Zhengzhou industrial park, where Foxconn makes iPhones, begins a weeklong lockdown to counteract the “severe and complicated” spread of COVID-19  —  HONG KONG—The industrial park where Foxconn Technology Group’s iPhone assembly plant is struggling to maintain production amid …

Raksha Kumar / Rest of World: A look at the everyday sexism faced by Indian women working in tech; around 36% of India’s 5M tech workers are women, of which 7% hold executive-level positions  —  Tech helped more Indian women join the workforce, but they’re still fighting to be treated equally.

The world’s largest digital camera has a sensor resolution the same as 266 iPhones

Neural networks, a type of computing system loosely modeled on the organization of the human brain, form the basis of many artificial intelligence systems for applications such speech recognition, computer vision, and medical image analysis. In the field of neuroscience, researchers often use neural networks to try to model the same kind of tasks that […]

Capable of operating almost 7 miles down, the titanium Deepsea Challenge takes the watch world’s battle for diver supremacy to new depths.

Natasha Mascarenhas / TechCrunch: Rewind, whose Mac app creates a searchable recording to help users find what they’ve seen, said, or heard, raised a $10M seed led by a16z at a $75M valuation  —  Apple’s M1 and M2 chips give Optimizely co-founder a key in  —  While there have been quite a few attempts to […]

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: Dropbox says hackers stole code and some API keys from 130 GitHub repositories via a phishing campaign, but its core apps and infrastructure were unaffected  —  Dropbox disclosed a security breach after threat actors stole 130 code repositories after gaining access to one of its GitHub …

Emily Bary / MarketWatch: Match Group reports Q3 revenue up 1% YoY to $810M, vs. $793M est., paying users up 2% YoY to 16.5M, and plans Hinge and The League investments; stock jumps 15%+  —  Company plans to focus on ‘targeted, high-returning investments’ in Hinge and The League next year while monitoring headcount and marketing […]

Artificial Intelligence trains low-cost robot dog to perform tasks previously achievable by machines ten times more expensive

An AI has been used to train robot dogs to toss cups into a garbage can or wipe a whiteboard with an eraser while cutting out hand-coding, which makes them one-tenth the usual cost

Ukraine has used drones in innovative ways throughout the Russia-Ukraine war, and may now be preparing to deploy machines capable of finding and attacking targets without direct human control

Voters need to pay attention to races up and down the ballot — especially to more obscure county-level contests — to protect democracy, panelists said during an Oct. 12 discussion titled “Why the 2022 Elections May Determine the Future of Democracy in the U.S.” While national and congressional races get the most attention, voters may […]