Category: Uncategorized

Apoorva Mittal / The Economic Times: Coinbase “temporarily” disables the option to buy cryptocurrencies with the Unified Payments Interface in India; source: the issue is crypto is not legal tender  —  US Co reached out to NPCI following regulator’s clarification on no UPI for cryptocurrencies in India …

Madhumita Murgia / Financial Times: A profile of Father Paolo Benanti, an engineer and ethicist who advises theologians and priests, including Pope Francis, on moral and ethical issues in AI  —  On February 26, two days after war broke out in Europe for the first time in decades, Father Paolo Benanti walked briskly through the […]

Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer: A hacking group called NB65 claims it is using modified versions of Conti’s leaked ransomware to attack Russian entities, including the space agency Roscosmos  —  A hacking group used the Conti’s leaked ransomware source code to create their own ransomware to use in cyberattacks against Russian organizations.

Axios: Elon Musk tweets that all Twitter Blue subscribers “should get an authentication checkmark” and suggests the service should be ad-free with a lower price  —  Elon Musk suggested in a series of tweets Saturday night changes to the premium Twitter Blue service …

Emma Roth / The Verge: Twitter reverts a change that left blank spaces in place of deleted embedded tweets and says it is exploring “different options”  —  Twitter says it’s exploring ‘different options’  —  Twitter has confirmed it reversed a change that altered the appearance of deleted tweets embedded …

Issie Lapowsky / Protocol: Meta’s civil rights team made progress in its first year, including removing sensitive ad targeting categories, but experts say it needs to be empowered to act  —  Like everyone, Roy Austin Jr. saw President Trump’s Facebook post that went up in the summer of 2020 — the one where he threatened […]

The Information: Sources: Meta chose a Qualcomm chip for the second version of its Ray-Ban smartglasses, after struggling to develop its own custom chip codenamed Brasilia  —  In late 2021, a team of Meta Platforms employees building a key chip for the second version of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses was notified …

Ryan Broderick / Fast Company: Inside the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, which felt confusing and disjointed, as the cultural spotlight on Ethereum left Bitcoin feeling a little stale  —  What happens when you’re no longer the hot young cryptocurrency?  That’s the question hanging over the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami this week.

Marília Marasciulo / Rest of World: How Brazilian singer Anitta’s fans gamed Spotify’s algorithm to make her song top the charts by switching accounts after 20 streams, creating playlists, more  —  Fans skirted terms and conditions, but a strategy from the singer’s team came close to the streaming platform’s limit.

Byungwook Kim / Reuters: Samsung’s reputation has taken a hit in South Korea, where three major carriers have halved the price of Galaxy S22, amid reports of hobbled device performance  —  Samsung Electronics’ (005930.KS) flagship Galaxy S22 smartphone has taken a battering from reports of hobbled performance …

Clarence Leong / Wall Street Journal: FactSet: revenue growth for China’s tech giants is slowing; the average target for Meituan’s shares fell 20%+ in March, while Tencent and JD’s shares fell 10%+  —  Beijing’s anti-Covid measures are likely to exacerbate a slowdown in revenue growth for companies including Alibaba and Meituan

New York Times: A view of the chip-making process at Intel’s campuses in Hillsboro, OR, and Chandler, AZ, and the infrastructure behind its two planned $10B Arizona fabs  —  As the global chip shortage continues, we take an inside look at how semiconductors are fabricated.

Zheping Huang / Bloomberg: Despite China’s private sector crackdown in 2021, two unidentified Tencent executives still earned ~$200M each; Tencent’s shares dropped 19% in 2021  —  Tencent Holdings Ltd. doled out more than $200 million apiece to two unidentified executives in 2021, even as it cut founder Pony Ma’s compensation …

Fully homomorphic encryption allows us to run analysis on data without ever seeing the contents. It could help us reap the full benefits of big data, from fighting financial fraud to catching diseases early

High radiation levels seen as Russian forces captured the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in February were put down to contaminated topsoil being disturbed, but experts now believe they could have been due to interference with wireless sensors

Betty Hou / Bloomberg: TSMC reports a record ~$17B in Q1 revenue, up 36% YoY and above estimates, boosted by increased demand for chips as the prolonged shortage helped raise prices  —  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. revenue rose to a record in the first quarter on demand for chips used in smartphones …

Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE: Gartner: total global tech spending will rise 4% YoY to $4.4T in 2022, device spending will reach $824.6B, and software spending will rise 9.8% YoY to $674.9B  —  The respected analyst firm Gartner Inc. said today in its latest forecast that worldwide information technology is expected …

Tonya Riley / CyberScoop: US judge sentences Denys Iarmak, a Ukrainian and member of the FIN7 hacking group, to five years in prison; FIN7 has stolen 20M+ credit card numbers since 2015  —  Denys Iarmak, a high-level member of the criminal hacking group FIN7, was sentenced to five years in prison today by a U.S. […]

Kim Lyons / The Verge: Twitter says its ALT badge for images with text descriptions and an expanded description window is now available globally, after testing the features in March  —  The platform said earlier this year it was making improvements to the process  —  Twitter said Thursday that its ALT badge …

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: Microsoft says it obtained a court order to take control of seven domains used by Russia-linked hacking group Strontium, disrupting its attacks on Ukraine  —  Microsoft has successfully disrupted attacks against Ukrainian targets coordinated by the Russian APT28 hacking group after taking …

Xinmei Shen / South China Morning Post: Sensor Tower: Tencent’s Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile are the world’s most lucrative mobile games, respectively earning $735.4M and $643M in revenue in Q1 2022  —  Honour of Kings, PUBG Mobile and Genshin Impact remained the most lucrative mobile games in the world in the first quarter […]

Paul Vigna / Wall Street Journal: One-click checkout service Bolt acquires crypto payments startup Wyre, sources say for around $1.5B  —  Deal extends crypto’s hot M&A market following record deal activity in 2021  —  Bolt Financial Inc., a payments-focused financial technology company, is acquiring crypto-services startup …

Zheping Huang / Bloomberg: Tencent will shutter its game streaming service Penguin Esports on June 7, after China blocked a Tencent-led merger between Huya and DouYu  —  Tencent Holdings Ltd. announced it will shut down its game streaming service, more than a year after Beijing blocked its effort to create China’s equivalent …

An inability to access face-to-face therapy has led to the rise of tech alternatives, but do they really improve mental health, asks Eleanor Morgan

Nitasha Tiku / Washington Post: How Gwyneth Paltrow, Mila Kunis, and others are pushing women to invest in NFTs, which critics see as a form of self-serving feminism centered on white women  —  Gwyneth Paltrow and Mila Kunis joined a Zoom in January to encourage 5,000 women in the audience to break into the male-dominated […]

Wall Street Journal: Sources: banks including JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo are considering whether to use Zelle as a payment option to compete with Visa and Mastercard  —  The money-transfer service boomed amid pandemic.  Some banks want to expand it to retail payments.

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Nord Security, the Lithuania-based startup behind NordVPN, raises $100M, its first ever funding, at a $1.6B valuation led by Novator Ventures  —  VPN usage has surged in the last several years, with growing concerns over data privacy and security — and sometimes completely different motivations …

Maria Deutscher / SiliconANGLE: Ascend.io, which develops data automation tools for enterprise customers, raises a $31M Series B led by Tiger Global  —  Data automation startup Ascend.io today announced that it has secured a $31 million funding round led by prominent technology investment firm Tiger Global.

The black-and-white images provided by night-vision cameras can be colourised using AI, but it must always be trained on similar images and is unlikely to ever work on unfamiliar general scenes

Splitting a robot’s AI brain into modules that handle simpler tasks means it can be trained more quickly, but that may come at the cost of adaptability

Flexible objects are difficult for robots to handle, but a new approach could allow artificial nurses to help patients dress

Vishal Chawla / The Block: Sky Mavis, which runs Axie Infinity, raises $150M led by Binance, with participation from Animoca, a16z, and others, to reimburse users after the Ronin exploit  —  Sky Mavis, the creator of play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, has raised $150 million to reimburse its users who lost funds during …

Vera Bergengruen / TIME: Inside Kyiv’s IT office, whose workers have spent the past five weeks adapting and repurposing everyday tech, like the Kyiv Digital smartphone app, for wartime  —  Even the app’s logo reflects this shift.  What was once a friendly sky-blue “K” for Kyiv has been redesigned into a black-and-gray military camo pattern.

Kevin Marks: Twitter changed how embeds work for deleted tweets, causing blank spaces on websites; Twitter says it is “to better respect” when users deleted their tweets  —  Twitter Edits You 2022-04-06 With all the fuss about Twitter’s promised edit button, and how they might design it …

Mitchell Clark / The Verge: Twitter requires removing tweets posted by government or state-affiliated media accounts that contain media of prisoners of war from the Russia-Ukraine conflict  —  It’ll ‘ask government or state-affiliated media accounts’ to take down pictures featuring prisoners of war

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Dropbox Shop, which lets creators sell digital content directly to customers, launches an open beta in the US with more store customization options and tipping  —  Dropbox Shop, a platform that allows creators to sell digital content directly to their customers, is now available in open beta, Dropbox announced on Tuesday.

The UK has announced plans to create its own non-fungible tokens in a bid to demonstrate its enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies

John Paul Tasker / CBC News: Canada’s government introduces legislation that would force major online platforms run by Google and Meta to negotiate deals with publishers, like in Australia  —  Bill demands that companies like Google and Facebook pay news businesses to use their content

Solar panels are cooler than the night air, creating a temperature difference that can be exploited to produce electricity

Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet: Microsoft announces a preview of ARM-based chips for Azure virtual machines, using Ampere Altra CPUs  —  It’s been a long time coming, but Microsoft is making available a preview of Azure VMs supporting Arm-based processors from Ampere.  —  It’s been a long road, but Microsoft announced …

Ken Klippenstein / The Intercept: Internal Amazon documents show its planned internal messaging app would block union-related words, including “union”, “grievance”, and “pay raise”  —  Amazon will block and flag employee posts on a planned internal messaging app that contain keywords pertaining …

Bloomberg: FTX makes a “significant” investment in stock exchange IEX, made famous by Michael Lewis’ “Flash Boys”; IEX represented 2.7% of US equities volume in March  —  Crypto exchange FTX US agreed to take a stake in IEX Group Inc., owner of the stock exchange made famous by …

Etan Vlessing / Hollywood Reporter: Roku and Amazon extend their distribution agreement, letting users continue accessing Prime Video and IMDb TV apps on their Roku devices; Roku stock is up 5%+  —  The new multi-year agreement means the Amazon Prime Video app will remain in Roku’s Channel Store.

Emily Baker-White / BuzzFeed News: Former ByteDance employees say the company scraped Instagram, Snap, and others to make fake accounts on TikTok predecessor Flipagram, later renamed Vigo Video  —  In 2017, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, scraped short-form videos, user names, profile pictures, and profile descriptions from Instagram …

Associated Press: Research: RT en Español is the third-most shared site on Twitter for Spanish-language info about Russia’s invasion and in March saw a boost in Facebook likes  —  Disinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is surging in Spanish, as stories crafted for a Latin American audience gets a boost from the Kremlin

Eva Dou / Washington Post: Huawei promotes CFO Meng Wanzhou, daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, as one of three rotating chairs, six months after her detention in Canada  —  SHANGHAI — Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies has promoted chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou to a key role just half a year …

Reuters: Sources: Truth Social’s CTO Josh Adams and product chief Billy Boozer have quit, following a troubled launch for the Trump-backed social network  —  The two Southern tech entrepreneurs had the two qualities that Donald Trump’s Truth Social startup needed: tech-industry expertise …

Finextra: French startup Budget Insight, which helps clients initiate payments and aggregate financial data and documents, raises $35M from PSG Equity  —  Budget Insight, the leading aggregator of banking and financial data in France and a pioneer of Open Finance in Europe, is pleased to announce $35m …

damsondao / P — Mirror: Unpacking Terra’s design for its algorithmic stablecoins and how partial collateralization using bitcoin reserves could impact its price stabilization mechanism  —  As Terra climbed crypto market cap rankings at the start of 2022 while most of the market dumped or stalled …

NBC News: Government record keepers and watchdogs worry that use of Wickr and other auto-deletion apps may help CBP and other agencies sidestep transparency requirements  —  In October, Laurence Brewer, the chief records officer of the National Archives and Records Administration …