Network Support Blog

Gaby Del Valle / The Verge: Over 50 ex-Google employees, fired in connection with a sit-in protest against Google's business ties to Israel, file an NLRB complaint for unlawful retaliation  —  A software engineer who was fired from Google in connection to internal protests at the company's offices says the company retaliated … http://www.techmeme.com/240430/p48?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240430p48

Derek Andersen / Cointelegraph: Coinbase adds support for the Bitcoin Lightning Network via payments startup Lightspark, letting customers transfer bitcoin faster and at a lower cost  —  The integration brings instantaneous transfers on the layer-2 Lightning Network to the world's biggest Bitcoin exchange.  —  Total views http://www.techmeme.com/240430/p42?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240430p42

Elizabeth Lopatto / The Verge: US judge sentences Binance founder Changpeng Zhao to four months in prison  —  Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison for failing to establish adequately anti-money laundering protections.  Zhao, once the head of the largest crypto exchange in the world, pleaded guilty in November 2023. http://www.techmeme.com/240430/p33?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240430p33

Shira Ovide / Washington Post: Game emulator Delta has been the top US iOS app for weeks, after Apple lifted its ban on such apps, likely due to regulatory pressure and alt stores in the EU  —  Antitrust crackdowns on Apple are already changing your iPhone for the better  —  The hottest iPhone app in America may owe … http://www.techmeme.com/240430/p32?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240430p32

Todd Bishop / GeekWire: Amazon makes its AI assistant Amazon Q generally available and adds an “app creator” in preview to let employees build generative AI apps based on company data  —  Amazon says it will give non-developers the ability to create apps using natural language as part of a new feature for Amazon Q … http://www.techmeme.com/240430/p22?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240430p22

Sheila Chiang / CNBC: Samsung Q1: revenue up 12.81% YoY to ~$52.3B, vs. ~$51.6B est., and operating profit up 932.8% YoY to ~$4.8B, vs. ~$4.3B est., as memory chip prices rebound  —  Samsung Electronics Co. Galaxy S24 smartphones during a media preview event in Seoul, South Korea, on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024. http://www.techmeme.com/240429/p29?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240429p29

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: NIST launches a new program to assess generative AI technologies, with plans to release benchmarks, help create “content authenticity” detection tech, and more  —  The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Commerce Department agency that develops … http://www.techmeme.com/240429/p25?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240429p25

Lauren Feiner / The Verge: FCC fines T-Mobile $80M, AT&T $57M, and Verizon $47M for allegedly illegally sharing customers' location data to aggregators “without customer consent”  —  The FCC says it found the carriers “sold access to its customers' location information to 'aggregators … http://www.techmeme.com/240429/p23?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240429p23

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Getir plans to close its quick grocery delivery operations in the US, the UK, and Europe to focus on its home market of Turkey, impacting 6,000+ jobs  —  True to its business concept, Turkey's “instant delivery” juggernaut Getir rose quickly.  Now, with the quick commerce industry in free fall, it is nosediving just as fast. http://www.techmeme.com/240429/p14?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240429p14

Alexander Martin / The Record: The UK bans default guessable usernames and passwords for some IoT devices, to help avoid a situation like the 2016 Mirai botnet, the first country to do so  —  Seven years ago, a cyberattack left many of the most popular websites based in the United States inaccessible. http://www.techmeme.com/240429/p13?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240429p13

Paul Sawers / TechCrunch: An interview with MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria on leading the company for a decade, the evolution of databases, AI hype, transitioning to a SaaS model, and more  —  A decade is a long time in tech  —  A lot has happened since Dev Ittycheria took the reins at MongoDB, the $26 billion database company he's led … http://www.techmeme.com/240428/p9?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240428p9

Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer: Akamai: US Post Office phishing sites got significantly more DNS queries, cumulatively, than the legitimate website during some weeks of the 2023 holiday season  —  Security researchers analyzing phishing campaigns that target United States Postal Service (USPS) saw that the traffic … http://www.techmeme.com/240428/p8?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240428p8

Scott Nover / Fast Company: AI is making Meta's apps basically unusable, as the company adds Meta AI everywhere and viral user-generated AI images proliferate on Facebook and Instagram  —  The intended and unintended generative AI flooding Facebook and Instagram.  —  Meta has flooded its social media platforms with artificial intelligence. http://www.techmeme.com/240428/p7?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240428p7

Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch: Some founders say TikTok ban won't impact creator economy startups much, as they have diversified across multiple platforms after Trump tried banning it in 2020  —  ‘Two years ago, this would have been devastating’  —  President Joe Biden signed a bill on Wednesday that could ban TikTok — for real this time. http://www.techmeme.com/240428/p2?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240428p2

Debangana Ghosh / Moneycontrol: India's top five IT services companies, including Infosys and Wipro, collectively saw a decline of 69,167 employees in FY 2024; HCLTech added 1,537 employees  —  Four out of the five top IT companies including TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Tech Mahindra lost employees both sequentially in Q4 and full year FY24. http://www.techmeme.com/240428/p1?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240428p1

Washington Post: TikTok users with stigmatized interests or marginalized identities express anxiety over its potential ban, as rebuilding their communities elsewhere may be hard  —  President Biden signed legislation Wednesday that could ban TikTok, leaving users in the United States who have spent years building … http://www.techmeme.com/240427/p12?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240427p12

Julie Zauzmer Weil / Washington Post: The IRS says it spent $10.5M to develop and $2.4M to run its free tax filing website, used by 140K+ households in 12 states, and claims high user satisfaction  —  In its first year, more than 140,000 households in 12 states did their taxes with Direct File  —  The Biden administration … http://www.techmeme.com/240427/p11?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240427p11

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: EyeEm, the bankrupt photo sharing network acquired by Freepik last year, will license users' photos to train AI if the images are not deleted within 30 days  —  EyeEm, the Berlin-based photo-sharing community that exited last year to Spanish company Freepik after going bankrupt, is now licensing its users' photos to train AI models. http://www.techmeme.com/240427/p10?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240427p10

Nikkei Asia: Google opens its second hardware office in New Taipei City, as VP of Engineering Elmer Peng says “Taiwan is Google's largest hardware R&D hub outside of the US”  —  Search engine giant ‘serious’ about beefing up equipment and software ecosystem http://www.techmeme.com/240427/p1?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240427p1

Chance Miller / 9to5Mac: A number of Apple users say they were logged out of their Apple ID across multiple devices on April 26 and forced to reset their password before logging back in  —  A number of people on social media say that they were logged out of their Apple ID across multiple devices on Friday evening … http://www.techmeme.com/240426/p22?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240426p22

Madhumita Murgia / Financial Times: A profile of former Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg and her new startup Meeno, which provides an AI-powered chatbot for relationship advice on iOS and has raised $4.9M  —  Ex-Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg thinks advanced AI can help  —  By the time Renate Nyborg quit her job in 2022 she had become accustomed … http://www.techmeme.com/240406/p11?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240406p11

Cheyenne MacDonald / Engadget: Report: Google changed its privacy policy in June 2022 to more broadly cover its use of publicly available content, including Google Docs, to train AI models  —  According to The New York Times, the companies may have violated YouTube creators' copyrights.  —  OpenAI and Google trained … http://www.techmeme.com/240406/p9?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240406p9

Alexandra Sternlicht / Fortune: A look at OnlyFans AI chatbot startups, which are replacing some low-wage workers with bots trained on creators' chats to mimic their dirty talk and upselling  —  Hey there, it's tech reporter Alexandra Sternlicht.  —  OnlyFans creators' careers are underwritten by sexting. http://www.techmeme.com/240406/p8?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240406p8

Kia Kokalitcheva / Axios: Source: Y Combinator is inviting some alumni entrepreneurs to invest a minimum of $250,000, which will be split among the three funds it is currently raising  —  - The accelerator is requiring limited partners invest in all three of its new funds, a somewhat bold move in the current environment. http://www.techmeme.com/240406/p7?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240406p7

Lewis Gordon / The Ringer: A look at Monument Valley, a puzzle game developed by ustwo that won Apple's design award in 2014 and stood out in a market dominated by free-to-play titles  —  A scene as still and pure as it is confounding: towers stretching up, flags billowing gently in the wind, stone walkways appearing to defy the principles of architecture. http://www.techmeme.com/240406/p4?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240406p4

Alex Kantrowitz / Big Technology: Google, Yahoo, Perplexity, and other search companies are working on understanding user intent to decide whether to show generative AI answers or just links  —  Yahoo is one of the most visited websites on the planet.  It's the most popular news site in the U.S., with more than 3 billion visits each month. http://www.techmeme.com/240405/p22?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240405p22

Jackie Davalos / Bloomberg: OpenAI's COO says that ChatGPT Enterprise has 600K+ paying customers, up from ~150K in January, and 2024 will be “the year of adoption for AI in the enterprise”  —  - ChatGPT Enterprise now has more than 600,000 users signed up  — COO says this ‘is going to be the year of adoption for AI’ http://www.techmeme.com/240405/p7?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240405p7

Dan Milmo / The Guardian: Microsoft warns that China plans to disrupt elections in the US, South Korea, and India this year with AI-generated content after making a dry run in Taiwan  —  Beijing did a test run in Taiwan using AI-generated content to influence voters away from a pro-sovereignty candidate http://www.techmeme.com/240405/p4?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240405p4

Wall Street Journal: Sources: Samsung plans to more than double its total chip investment in Taylor, Texas to ~$44B, a significant breakthrough for US' chip manufacturing plans  —  South Korean firm plans to add a second semiconductor factory and advanced-packaging facility at its new hub outside Austin http://www.techmeme.com/240405/p3?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240405p3

Louise Matsakis / Wired: How a TikTok whistleblower may have driven congressional concerns about the app despite working at TikTok for just six months and making improbable claims  —  Zen Goziker worked at TikTok for only six months.  Many of his allegations about the company and the US government are improbable. http://www.techmeme.com/240405/p2?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240405p2

Todd Spangler / Variety: Vimeo names Philip Moyer, an ex-VP of applied AI engineering and business development at Google Cloud, as CEO and board member, replacing interim CEO Adam Gross  —  Video platform provider Vimeo named Philip Moyer, a senior exec at Google Cloud overseeing AI applied engineering and business development, as CEO and member of its board. http://www.techmeme.com/240404/p36?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240404p36

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Cisco launches the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium, joined by Google, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, SAP, and Accenture, to research AI's impact on 56 ICT job roles  —  AI might not be coming for all jobs, but it might be coming for some.  —  UPS's largest layoff in its 116-year history was the result of … http://www.techmeme.com/240404/p22?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240404p22

Scott Stein / CNET: An interview with Andrew Bosworth on the 10th anniversary of Reality Labs, the past and future of VR/AR/AI, Meta's next AR glasses prototype, and more  —  Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth talks with CNET about the past and future of VR, AR and AI.  —  2014 doesn't seem that long ago to me. http://www.techmeme.com/240404/p11?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240404p11

Mark Bergen / Bloomberg: Paris-based Pigment, a subscription-based business planning and forecasting service, raised $145M, sources say at a $1B+ valuation, for $393M in total funding  —  - French software startup said to be valued above $1 billion  — Funding round comes as VC financing remains sluggish globally http://www.techmeme.com/240404/p10?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240404p10

Lindsay Ellis / Wall Street Journal: How some MBA programs in the US are reorienting their courses around AI by adding AI-related classwork, encouraging using AI to solve lab assignments, and more  —  American University, other top M.B.A. programs reorient courses around artificial intelligence; ‘It has eaten our world’ http://www.techmeme.com/240404/p9?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240404p9

Amrita Khalid / The Verge: X adds blue checks to some large accounts as part of its plan to give free Premium memberships to those with at least 2,500 “verified subscriber followers”  —  Just as Elon Musk said, X is doling out free Premium and Premium memberships to accounts with a high number of verified followers. http://www.techmeme.com/240403/p32?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240403p32

Emilia David / The Verge: Stability AI releases Stable Audio 2.0, which lets users create three-minute sound clips from copyright-free audio samples, available for free via its website  —  Stable Audio 2., an audio generation model for Stability AI, now lets users upload their own audio samples which they can then … http://www.techmeme.com/240403/p12?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240403p12

Granth Vanaik / Reuters: PE firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice agrees to buy a majority ownership of IT services provider Presidio from BC Partners; sources: deal could value Presidio at $4B+  —  U.S. private equity firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice (CD&R) said on Tuesday it had agreed to acquire a majority ownership position … http://www.techmeme.com/240402/p30?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240402p30

Ryan Gould / Bloomberg: PE firm EQT AB agrees to acquire compliance software provider Avetta from Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, sources say at a ~$3B valuation, including debt  —  - Deal values Avetta at about $3 billion including debt: sources  — Private equity dealmaking slowly starting to recover in 2024 http://www.techmeme.com/240402/p28?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240402p28

Reed Albergotti / Semafor: Replit launches Code Repair, an AI agent to automatically fix coding errors, and Teams, which allows developers to collaborate in real time on software projects  —  The Scoop  —  A Silicon Valley AI coding startup is launching a new tool that it hopes will change the way companies develop software. http://www.techmeme.com/240402/p23?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240402p23

research!rsc: A timeline of the attack on open-source project XZ Utils, which began in late 2021 and led to a backdoor with RCE in Linux distros from Debian, Red Hat, others  —  Over a period of over two years, an attacker using the name “Jia Tan” worked as a diligent, effective contributor to the xz compression library … http://www.techmeme.com/240402/p18?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240402p18

Saritha Rai / Bloomberg: Israel-based AI chipmaker Hailo raised a $120M Series C extension from Israeli firms and family offices at a $1.2B valuation, taking its total funding to $340M  —  - Startup raised $340 million to date and valued at $1.2 billion  — New Hailo-10 AI processor consumes less power, company says http://www.techmeme.com/240402/p8?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240402p8

Nilay Patel / The Verge: Q&A with Intuit Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on the core business of email, acquiring Mailchimp in 2021, generative AI, shutting down TinyLetter, and more  —  Intuit purchased Mailchimp in 2021, and less than a year later, co-founder Ben Chestnut was out.  Here's how new CEO Rania Succar is moving forward. http://www.techmeme.com/240402/p1?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240402p1

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: TikTok brings its dedicated STEM content feed to Europe, starting in the UK and Ireland, and says 33% of users have enabled the feed since its US launch in 2023  —  As TikTok continues to face increased pressure in the U.S. and the U.K., the company is signaling its commitment to fostering educational content on its app. http://www.techmeme.com/240401/p24?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240401p24

Bloomberg: Cloud data management startup Rubrik files for a NYSE IPO under the symbol RBRK, discloses a net loss of $354M on revenue of $628M for the year ended January 31  —  - Data security provider says subscription ARR grew by 47%  — Rubrik's filing follows trading debuts by Reddit, Astera Labs http://www.techmeme.com/240401/p19?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240401p19

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: AltStore, an alt iOS app store coming to EU thanks to DMA, plans to use a Patreon integration to let devs tie access to their apps to users' Patreon pledges  —  Apple's chokehold on the App Store ecosystem for iPhone apps stifles competition, according to the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) … http://www.techmeme.com/240401/p15?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240401p15

Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal: Sources: OpenAI discussed training GPT-5 on public YouTube video transcripts; AI industry's need for high-quality text data may outstrip supply within two years  —  Firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic are working to find enough information to train next-generation artificial-intelligence models http://www.techmeme.com/240401/p5?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger#a240401p5