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Worldcoin subsidiary World Assets plans to sell WLD tokens to meet the demand for orb-verified World IDs and support Worldcoin network growth; WLD drops 7%+ (Brian McGleenon/The Block)

WhatsApp rolls out passkey support on iOS, removing the need for users to deal with SMS one-time passcodes, six months after introducing the feature on Android (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Apple debuts OpenELM, a family of language models with 270M, 450M, 1.1B, and 3B parameters, designed to run on-device, pre-trained and fine-tuned on public data (Shubham Sharma/VentureBeat)

Source: Cognition, which offers an AI coding assistant, raised $175M led by Founders Fund at a $2B valuation, a month after a Series A at a $350M valuation (Kate Clark/The Information)

President Biden signs the ByteDance-TikTok divest-or-ban bill into law, after the Senate passed it by 79-18; the House passed the legislation 360-58 on April 20 (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)

The Biden campaign plans to continue using TikTok for at least the next year, with "enhanced security measures", to help "meet voters where they are" (Monica Alba/NBC News)

Whether TikTok is banned or not, this is the end as we know it for the money-losing app, which may lose focus due to advertiser, creator, and staff uncertainty (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

Klarna partners with Uber to power Uber and Uber Eats payments, adding its Pay Now option in the US, Germany, and Sweden, but not installment-based payments (Ryan Browne/CNBC)

Meta, Google, Snap, and Amazon all benefit from the US' TikTok ban; Mark Zuckerberg criticized TikTok's Chinese roots in 2019, part of Meta's broader campaign (Will Oremus/Washington Post)

Nvidia acquires AI infrastructure orchestration and management platform Run:ai, a source says for ~$700M; Run:ai, founded in 2018, raised $118M in total (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Sources: Qualcomm is cheating on Snapdragon X Plus and Elite benchmarks given to OEMs and the press; the numbers are not achievable with the claimed settings (Charlie Demerjian/SemiAccurate)

How a tiny group of US lawmakers and aides wrote the TikTok divestment bill, hiding their efforts to avoid TikTok's lobbying, alongside the DOJ and White House (New York Times)

US companies racing to build data centers to serve AI demand is causing a shortage of parts, property, and power; cooling system lead times are now 5x longer (Wall Street Journal)

Qualcomm details its Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite chips; benchmarks suggest the chips match Apple's M3, Intel's Core Ultra 9, and AMD's Ryzen 9 (Joanna Nelius/The Verge)

Dublin-based Tines, which offers no-code automation tools for security teams, raised a $50M Series B extension, sources say at a near $600M post-money valuation (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Hands-on with the Meta AI chatbot: fails at basic search queries, stinks at counting, excels at editing existing paragraphs, quickly creates images, and more (Brian X. Chen/New York Times)

Berlin-based Parloa, which uses conversational AI to automate call center operations, raised a $66M Series B led by Altimeter, after a $21M Series A in 2023 (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)

Microsoft begins rolling out ads in the Windows 11 Start menu showing app "recommendations" from "a small set of curated developers"; users can disable the ads (Tom Warren/The Verge)

US prosecutors argue Binance founder Changpeng Zhao should spend three years in prison and pay $50M for his role violating sanctions and money laundering laws (Nikhilesh De/CoinDesk)

Filings: in 2024, ByteDance and TikTok spent $7M+ combined on lobbying against the US TikTok bill; AdImpact: TikTok spent $4.5M+ on TV and digital ad campaigns (Brian Schwartz/CNBC)

SK Hynix plans to spend ~$3.86B to build a new DRAM chip facility in South Korea, starting construction this month and aiming for completion by November 2025 (Joyce Lee/Reuters)

Biden signing the TikTok divestment bill starts a 270-day countdown for a sale or a US prohibition; sources say ByteDance sees divestiture as a last resort (Alex Barinka/Bloomberg)

An interview with Apple Arcade's Senior Director Alex Rofman: the service hit record highs on all "critical metrics" in 2023, and will feature Vision Pro games (Keith Stuart/The Guardian)

The US OFAC sanctions four Iranian nationals over cyberattacks on the US government, defense contractors, and private companies, and the DOJ unseals indictments (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

An interview with Embracer Group CEO Lars Wingefors on criticism over mass layoffs and studio closures, splitting the company into three, rising debt, and more (James Batchelor/GamesIndustry.biz)

How Palantir, which doesn't have a traditional salesforce, is using software boot camps to attract customers, hosting an average of about five per day in 2024 (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)

A look at the restaurant reservation ecosystem in New York City, where new apps have sprung up to help diners book a table at buzzy restaurants for a price (Adam Iscoe/New Yorker)

A deep dive into how Bluesky is built, including its growth from three engineers to 12 in just over two years and its infrastructure move from AWS to on-prem (The Pragmatic Engineer)

Microsoft must take security seriously again by being transparent about breaches and no longer charging its subscribers extra for must-have security features (Mary Jo Foley/Directions on Microsoft)

Paris-based FlexAI, which is developing an on-demand cloud service for AI training, emerges from stealth with a $30M in seed funding (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)

Mobvoi, a Google-backed Chinese smartwatch and AI company, fell as much as 22% in the first day of trading, after raising $41M in its Hong Kong IPO (Filipe Pacheco/Bloomberg)

Emails released as part of US v. Google show how Google's finance and ad teams led by Prabhakar Raghavan made Search worse to make the company more money (Edward Zitron/Ed Zitron's Where's ...)

China approves US listing of self-driving startup Pony.ai, which plans to sell up to 98M shares and list on Nasdaq or NYSE, signaling an ease on the crackdown (Bloomberg)

Huawei unveils Qiankun, a new business unit focused on providing self-driving systems, marking the company's latest push to become a major EV industry player (Reuters)

SenseTime's stock rises 30%+ after the company unveiled the latest version of its SenseNova AI model; SenseTime's stock is down 80%+ since its 2021 HK IPO (Bloomberg)

Samsung starts mass production of its 9th-generation 286-layer 3D NAND memory chips, which increases data I/O speeds by 33% compared to 8th-gen 236-layer chips (Nami Matsuura/Nikkei Asia)

Paris-based Payflows, whose automated financial management SaaS could be deployed on top of existing ERP systems, raised a 25M Series A led by Balderton (Tom Matsuda/Sifted)

NY-based Campus, which is building an online alternative to traditional community colleges, raised a $23M Series A extension following a $29M Series A in 2023 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

Legal scholars discuss how the TikTok divestment bill could survive a First Amendment challenge and why the US will likely rely on a national security argument (Casey Newton/Platformer)

The US Senate passes the TikTok divestment bill by a margin of 79-18; the legislation now heads to President Biden, who has committed to sign it into law (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)

Xaira Therapeutics, which aims to use AI models to find new drugs to treat diseases, emerged from stealth with $1B in commitments from Sequoia and others (Sarah McBride/Bloomberg)

As software gets better at labeling photos, CAPTCHA designers are adopting more difficult logic-based prompts to thwart nefarious bots (Katie Deighton/Wall Street Journal)

Block says it has finished the development of its own 3nm bitcoin mining chip and is working through the design with a "leading global semiconductor foundry" (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

Letter: the US Department of Commerce is reviewing the national security implications of China's work in open-source RISC-V chip technology (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

Tesla teases a ridehailing function in its app and says its robotaxi will be "purpose-built", suggesting it will be built from the ground up to be self-driving (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

Larry Ellison says Oracle is moving its world headquarters from Austin to Nashville to be closer to a major healthcare epicenter (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

For the third time, Google delays the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome, pushing back its plans to early 2025 amid regulatory scrutiny (Seb Joseph/Digiday)

OpenAI announces new enterprise-grade features for API customers, including enhanced security, administrative controls, and new Assistants API capabilities (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

The European Parliament adopts right-to-repair rules clarifying manufacturer obligations to provide repair services, consumer access to spare parts, and more (Jacob Ridley/PC Gamer)

Taser company Axon launches an AI tool that turns body cam audio into police reports to save time; critics worry it will introduce errors into crucial evidence (Forbes)

The FTC bans noncompete clauses that restrict job switching, the first time in 50+ years that the FTC has issued a regulation mandating an economy-wide change (Wall Street Journal)

The US Senate advances the bill forcing a sale or ban of TikTok, preparing for a final vote on the bill as soon as Tuesday evening (Sara Dorn/Forbes)

Apptopia: Threads is now consistently surpassing X in US DAUs, up to ~28M in April, after it first began eclipsing X in Dec. 2023, but X still has more US MAUs (Kali Hays/Business Insider)

Interviews with 20+ current and former TSMC staff at its Arizona plant finds struggles over bridging Taiwanese and US norms, rigid hierarchies, and other issues (Viola Zhou/Rest of World)

Not only has GM sold driving data to insurers without telling users, but a GM app "bug" meant users who were enrolled in Smart Driver were told they weren't (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)

Microsoft took down its WizardLM 2 LLM after it reportedly missed "toxicity testing", but people already downloaded and re-uploaded it to GitHub, Hugging Face (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)

Taylor Swift's new album smashed streaming records; Spotify says it had 300M+ streams on launch day and became 2024's most-streamed album within just 12 hours (Chris Morris/Fortune)

Survey: Apple cut 2024 Vision Pro shipments to 400K-450K units, vs. a 700K+ market consensus, and cut orders mean demand has fallen sharply beyond expectations (Ming-Chi Kuo)

Meta's Ray-Ban Smart Glasses get support for video calling via WhatsApp and Messenger, hands-free Apple Music controls, and a new frame style (Victoria Song/The Verge)

Sources: AI search engine Perplexity is raising $250M+ at a $2.5B-$3B valuation with interest from previous backers NEA and IVP (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Repairable laptop maker Framework Computer raised a $17M Series A-1, after an $18M Series A in early 2022, to expand into new product categories (Brian Heater/TechCrunch)

Meta rolls out an early access multimodal AI to Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, primarily to help identify objects, translate signs, and write Instagram captions (Victoria Song/The Verge)

Apple announces a "special Apple Event" on May 7, where new iPads will likely be unveiled (Quentyn Kennemer/The Verge)

As Congress' TikTok bill moves ahead, lawmakers must show the public on what grounds the government is banning a popular and culturally significant platform (Dave Lee/Bloomberg)

Meta, Google, OpenAI, child safety group Thorn, nonprofit All Tech Is Human, and other AI groups sign on to an initiative to add new child safety measures (Deepa Seetharaman/Wall Street Journal)

Sonos updates its Android and iOS apps, rebuilding them to become more reliable, and plans to discontinue its Windows and macOS apps in favor of web apps (Chris Welch/The Verge)

Perplexity AI, which offers an AI chatbot to summarize search results, raised ~$63M led by Daniel Gross at a $1B+ valuation, up from $520M in January 2024 (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

An analysis of pinyin keyboard apps from Baidu, Honor, Samsung, Tencent, and others finds vulnerabilities that can reveal keystrokes to network eavesdroppers (The Citizen Lab)

Google fires ~20 more staff the company says participated in protests denouncing an Israeli cloud contract; an activist workers' group says the total is now 50+ (Washington Post)

Sources: two SEC lawyers resigned after a US federal judge sanctioned and sharply rebuked the SEC for "gross abuse" of power in crypto platform DEBT Box's case (Austin Weinstein/Bloomberg)

iPhone sales in China fell 19.1% YoY to a 15.7% share in Q1 2024; Vivo fell 0.4% YoY to 17.4%, Honor rose 11.5% YoY to 16.1%, and Huawei rose 69.7% YoY to 15.5% (Counterpoint Research)

Spotify reports Q1 revenue up 20% YoY to 3.6B, MAUs up 19% YoY to 615M, below 617.9M est., subscribers up 14% YoY to 239M, and a 168M operating income (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

Adobe adds AI tools to Photoshop powered by its new Firefly Image 3 model, including Reference Image to inspire the AI's output, available in beta on desktop (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Kaiko: in the past year, Binance's bitcoin trading share outside the US fell from 81.3% to 55.3%, OKX's rose from 3% to 7.3%, and Bybit's rose from 2% to 9.3% (Suvashree Ghosh/Bloomberg)

Analysis: 10 Chinese entities acquired advanced Nvidia chips embedded in Supermicro, Dell, and Gigabyte products between November 20, 2023 and February 28, 2024 (Reuters)

Elon Musk criticizes Australia's order to remove a video of a religious leader's stabbing, after the eSafety commissioner took X to court and the PM weighed in (Mike Cherney/Wall Street Journal)

French electrical equipment maker Legrand agrees to acquire Dutch health software company Enovation from PE firm Main Capital Partners, sources say for 500M+ (Bloomberg)

Microsoft launches Phi-3 Mini, a 3.8B-parameter model that competes with GPT-3.5, and plans to release Phi-3 Small and Phi-3 Medium with 7B and 14B parameters (Emilia David/The Verge)

A look at Jeff Yass' Susquehanna International Group, which has a ~15% ByteDance stake worth ~$40B and has invested $3.5B+ across 350+ deals in China since 2005 (Financial Times)

Q&A with BCG CEO Christoph Schweizer, who says the consulting firm expects 20% of its 2024 and 40% of its 2026 revenue will come from helping firms integrate AI (Financial Times)

Infotech Headlines Today
[Wed-24-Apr-2024]

12 Best Wi-Fi Routers (2024): Budget, Gaming, Mesh - Wired

18 Best Portable Battery Chargers (2024): For Phones, iPads, Laptops, and More - Wired

2024 Chevrolet Electric Silverado: What we know - Pocket Lint

45 startups shortlisted for the 2024 edition Of The Africatech Awards - TechMoran

5 Best VPN Services (2024): For Routers, PC, iPhone, Android, and More - Wired

5 features to try out in the new Photoshop Beta - Pocket Lint

5 key Cybersecurity Steps for SMEs Thriving in the Cloud Era - Itnewsafrica

5 things to know about the new Sonos app - Pocket Lint

7 signs to upgrade your AirPods - Pocket Lint

8 essential apps I have on my Google Pixel phone - Pocket Lint

A deep dive into how Bluesky is built, including its growth from three engineers to 12 in just over two years and its infrastructure move from AWS to on-prem (The Pragmatic Engineer) - Techmeme

A look at the restaurant reservation ecosystem in New York City, where new apps have sprung up to help diners book a table at buzzy restaurants for a price (Adam Iscoe/New Yorker) - Techmeme

AGM G2 Guardian: Meet rugged smartphone made for extreme environments - Technology Times

AI Is Poisoning Reddit To Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO - Slashdot

An interview with Apple Arcade's Senior Director Alex Rofman: the service hit record highs on all "critical metrics" in 2023, and will feature Vision Pro games (Keith Stuart/The Guardian) - Techmeme

An interview with Embracer Group CEO Lars Wingefors on criticism over mass layoffs and studio closures, splitting the company into three, rising debt, and more (James Batchelor/GamesIndustry.biz) - Techmeme

Anon is building an automated authentication layer for the gen AI age - Techcrunch

Apple debuts OpenELM, a family of language models with 270M, 450M, 1.1B, and 3B parameters, designed to run on-device, pre-trained and fine-tuned on public data (Shubham Sharma/VentureBeat) - Techmeme

Apple Releases OpenELM: Small, Open Source AI Models Designed To Run On-device - Slashdot

Apple Removes WhatsApp and Threads from China App Store Over Security Concerns - TechCity

Apples highly anticipated iPad launch event set for may 7 - TechMoran

ArcaneDoor' Cyberspies Hacked Cisco Firewalls to Access Government Networks - Wired

As software gets better at labeling photos, CAPTCHA designers are adopting more difficult logic-based prompts to thwart nefarious bots (Katie Deighton/Wall Street Journal) - Techmeme

Bang & Olufsen Beosystem 9000c: Price, Specs, Release Date - Wired

Berlin-based Parloa, which uses conversational AI to automate call center operations, raised a $66M Series B led by Altimeter, after a $21M Series A in 2023 (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch) - Techmeme

Beyond making ends meet: Surprising reasons why employees juggle multiple jobs - Techpoint

Biden signing the TikTok divestment bill starts a 270-day countdown for a sale or a US prohibition; sources say ByteDance sees divestiture as a last resort (Alex Barinka/Bloomberg) - Techmeme

Biden signs bill that would ban TikTok if ByteDance fails to sell the app - Techcrunch

Biden Signs TikTok 'Divest or Ban' Bill Into Law - Slashdot

Binance's executive arrest in Kenya reportedly debunked by wife and Kenyan officials - Techpoint

Block lets Square merchants convert a part of their daily sales to bitcoin - Techcrunch

Block says it has finished the development of its own 3nm bitcoin mining chip and is working through the design with a "leading global semiconductor foundry" (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC) - Techmeme

Braintree Attains the Status of LS Retail Diamond Partner - Itnewsafrica

Can Augmented Reality Be the Future of Cybersecurity - Itnewsafrica

Can the First Amendment Save TikTok - Wired

Centre of Excellence for Fiber Optic Technicians Launched - Itnewsafrica

Change Healthcare Finally Admits It Paid Ransomware Hackers - Slashdot

China approves US listing of self-driving startup Pony.ai, which plans to sell up to 98M shares and list on Nasdaq or NYSE, signaling an ease on the crackdown (Bloomberg) - Techmeme

Climate change is slowing Earth's rotation - The Economist

Companies Overlook the African Cloud Ecosystem's Potential - Itnewsafrica

CoralRaider Malware Campaign Exploits CDN Cache to Spread Info-Stealers - Hackers News

Court adjourns Binances Tigran Gambaryans bail ruling to May 17 - Techpoint

Diamond Market Shows Serious Cracks From Man-Made Stones - Slashdot

Diddo's new funding will bring its shoppable TV API to streaming platforms - Techcrunch

Doctors Combined a Heart Pump and Pig Kidney Transplant in Breakthrough Surgery - Wired

Dripos raises $11M Series A to replace Square, Toast and 8 other pieces of software - Techcrunch

Dublin-based Tines, which offers no-code automation tools for security teams, raised a $50M Series B extension, sources say at a near $600M post-money valuation (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch) - Techmeme

Eastern Cape Schools Embrace Coding and Robotics - Itnewsafrica

Electric Vehicles: IZI Rwanda delivers 5 electric buses to ease public transportation in Kigali - Technext

Emails released as part of US v. Google show how Google's finance and ad teams led by Prabhakar Raghavan made Search worse to make the company more money (Edward Zitron/Ed Zitron's Where's ...) - Techmeme

eScan Antivirus Update Mechanism Exploited to Spread Backdoors and Miners - Hackers News

EU's new right-to-repair rules force companies to repair out-of-warranty devices - Engadget

Ex-Amazon Exec Claims She Was Asked To Ignore Copyright Law in Race To AI - Slashdot

Exciting announcement: Introducing The Big Daily newsletter - Techcabal

Filings: in 2024, ByteDance and TikTok spent $7M+ combined on lobbying against the US TikTok bill; AdImpact: TikTok spent $4.5M+ on TV and digital ad campaigns (Brian Schwartz/CNBC) - Techmeme

Fintech gaming startup Sanlo's webshop tool could help developers avoid costly app store fees - Techcrunch

FinTechNGR to host session on PAPPS - Technology Times

Flame-Throwing Robot Dog Now Available Under $10,000 - Slashdot

For the third time, Google delays the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome, pushing back its plans to early 2025 amid regulatory scrutiny (Seb Joseph/Digiday) - Techmeme