~techmeme | Bookmarks (1000)

Tim Hardwick / MacRumors: Norwegian payment service Vipps launches the world's first Apple Pay alternative on iOS, following Apple's move to open NFC access to developers from iOS 18.1  —  Norwegian payment service Vipps has become the world's first company to launch a competing tap-to-pay solution to Apple Pay on iPhone …

Jonathan Vanian / CNBC: Oracle reports Q2 revenue up 9% YoY to $14.06B, vs. $14.1B est., and signs a deal with Meta to train Llama models on Oracle's cloud; ORCL drops 7%+ after hours  —  Oracle shares slid 7% in extended trading on Monday after the database software company reported fiscal second-quarter results …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: OpenAI says Sora limits the depiction of minors, and only a subset of users will be able to create videos of a real person using uploaded footage of that person  —  OpenAI launched its video-generating tool, Sora, on Monday.  But the company's opting not to release a key feature for most users pending further testing.

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: In mockups on GitHub, Bluesky teases Bluesky+, a $72-per-year or $8-per-month subscription offering profile customizations, higher video upload limits, and more  —  Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is working on subscriptions.  The company first announced plans to develop …

OpenAI: OpenAI launches Sora in select countries; ChatGPT Pro offers up to 500 videos per month at up to 1080p, and ChatGPT Plus offers up to 50 videos at up to 720p  —  We're moving our video generation model out of research preview.  —  Learn more System Card  —  Our video generation model …

Marques Brownlee / Marques Brownlee on YouTube: Review of OpenAI's Sora video generator: excels at depicting landscapes, people, and stylistic content but often fails with basic physics like object permanence  —  SORA generates videos.  This is the first review.Get up to 40% off on last minute gifts at https://ridge.com/MKBHDThe (real) birding video: https://youtu.be/F...

John Russell / HPCwire: Google says it made a major quantum error correction breakthrough, unveils its Willow quantum chip with 105 improved qubits, and shares benchmarks and a roadmap  —  Google today introduced its latest quantum chip — Willow (~100 qubits) — coinciding with two key achievements run on the new chip …

Nilay Patel / The Verge: Q&A with Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman on AGI, Copilot, AI agents, the OpenAI deal, joining Microsoft in March 2024, managing ~10K staff, DeepMind, and more  —  The company's new AI chief on working for Microsoft, the OpenAI relationship, and when superintelligence might actually arrive.

David Belson / The Cloudflare Blog: Cloudflare 2024 report: global internet traffic grew 17.2% in 2024, Google remained the top service, global traffic from Starlink grew 3.3x in 2024, and more  —  The 2024 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review is our fifth annual review of Internet trends and patterns observed throughout the year …

Sabrina Willmer / Bloomberg: Filing: TikTok asks a US court to put on hold a law forcing a sale or ban of the app until SCOTUS can review it and the Trump admin can determine its position  —  TikTok asked that a US law forcing a sale or ban of the app by China-based parent company ByteDance Ltd. be put on hold to give...

The Guardian: An analysis of US FEC data: Trump received $273.2M in donations from tech executives and VCs, including $242.6M from Elon Musk, while Harris received $120.9M  —  FEC filings offer only a glimpse of the money tech is pouring into Washington as it seeks to influence government

Financial Times: Sources: ByteDance has taken an early lead in the generative AI race in China by poaching top talent from rivals and becoming Nvidia's biggest buyer in China  —  Beijing-based company has lured top AI talent from local rivals while becoming China's biggest buyer of Nvidia chips

Yongchang Chin / Bloomberg: Ant President Cyril Han will succeed Eric Jing as CEO on March 1; Jing will remain company chairman and Han, who is also the CFO, will continue reporting to him  —  Han will succeed Eric Jing as CEO on March 1 and be responsible for all business segments and daily management …

Wall Street Journal: A profile of Brain Krebs, who in the past 20 years has probed and outed some of the worst cybercriminals, including the alleged hackers of Snowflake clients  —  In the increasingly dangerous world of cybercrime, Brian Krebs faces threats, manipulation and the odd chess challenge

Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware: The Intel Foundry Technology Research team announces breakthroughs in interconnect scaling, gate-all-around transistors, and packaging  —  Smaller, faster, better.  —  Today, the Intel Foundry Technology Research team announced technology breakthroughs in 2D transistor technology using …

Simon Sharwood / The Register: Broadcom shelves plans to work directly with the top 2,000 VMware customers, focusing on just 500 and giving 1,500 back to partners as a way to stem migrations  —  Now wants to work with 500 and lean more on partners to defend against migrations - which Dell says are on the cards

Reuters: CapitaLand: Asia Pacific's colocation data center market is expected to grow to $52.2B by 2026, up from $25.5B in 2022, driven by demand for AI-based services  —  Global investors are queueing up to invest in data centre operators in Asia Pacific either by buying stakes directly or via public offerings …

Alexander Cornwell / Reuters: A White House official says that the US believes China-linked Salt Typhoon hackers targeted and recorded the phone calls of “very senior” US political figures  —  The U.S. believes that an alleged sweeping Chinese cyber espionage campaign known as Salt Typhoon targeted …

Sharon Goldman / Fortune: David Sacks, who called OpenAI a “piranha for-profit company”, becoming AI czar comes at a delicate moment for OpenAI as it transitions to a for-profit  —  Sam Altman may be playing Santa with OpenAI's “12 days of shipmas” - a series of splashy product releases that kicked off Thursday …

Alicia Diaz / Bloomberg: Linda Yaccarino says X worked with the authors of the Kids Online Safety Act to make changes to protect freedom of speech and urges the House to pass the bill  —  - Senate passed bill in a tech privacy package in July  — Changes to bill safeguard free speech, lawmakers say

Axios: Sources: the US has approved the export of advanced AI chips to a Microsoft-operated facility in the UAE as part of the company's partnership with G42  —  - Lawmakers have raised concerns over the partnership, saying there is a risk it could open up a back door for China to access the advanced technology.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: X adds Aurora, an AI image generator that appears to excel at photorealistic images and has few restrictions; it isn't clear if xAI trained Aurora itself  —  X, the Elon Musk-owned social network previously known as Twitter, has added a new image generator to its Grok assistant.

Michael H. Keller / New York Times: An investigation finds 80+ livestreaming apps, like Bigo Live, on Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store that advertised child sexual abuse or bestiality  —  Smartphone apps downloaded from Apple and Google can allow parents and other abusers to connect with pedophiles who pay to watch — and direct — criminal behavior.

Matteo Wong / The Atlantic: OpenAI's o1 is a notable departure from older models, representing the AI industry's shift to reasoning models to overcome the limits of prediction-based LLMs  —  This week, openai launched what its chief executive, Sam Altman, called “the smartest model in the world”—a generative-AI program …