Microsoft says Windows 10 security updates will cost $61 per device for the first year, doubling for the next two years, after ending support in October 2025 (Tom Warren/The Verge)
Facebook updates its mobile video player with a TikTok-like vertical look and new controls for Reels, Live, and longform videos, starting with the US and Canada (Amrita Khalid/The Verge)
A draft US-EU statement outlines plans to use AI to search for replacements for so-called forever chemicals that are prevalent in chip manufacturing (Alberto Nardelli/Bloomberg)
A look at XZ Utils attacker "Jia Tan", a persona experts say was used by a nation state group and that left little trace after working on the project since 2021 (Wired)
Memo: AWS plans to cut several hundred jobs in its Sales, Marketing, and Global Services organization, and a few hundred in its Physical Stores Technology team (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
Sources: Spotify plans to raise prices by $1 to $2 per month in the UK, Australia, Pakistan, and two other markets by the end of April, and the US later in 2024 (Bloomberg)
Microsoft and Quantinuum detail a breakthrough in quantum error correction, helping run 14,000+ experiments with no errors, an issue that has vexed the industry (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)
Patreon rolls out a Reddit-like community moderation feature that lets podcasters, artists, writers, and other creators assign community members as moderators (Mia Sato/The Verge)
Stability AI releases Stable Audio 2.0, letting users create three minute sound clips from copyright-free audio samples, available for free via its website (Emilia David/The Verge)
Opera now lets Opera One users download and run 150 LLMs from 50+ families locally, including Llama and Google's Gemma, via the Ollama open source framework (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
Sources: crypto VC firm Paradigm is in talks to raise $750M to $850M for a new fund, which would be the largest since the crash; a16z raised $4.5B in May 2022 (Hannah Miller/Bloomberg)
A rising number of Chinese tech workers face legal action from former employers, including Pinduoduo and Tencent, looking to enforce strict noncompete clauses (Cissy Zhou/Nikkei Asia)
TSMC halts some chipmaking and evacuates plants after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake, Taiwan's biggest in 25 years, and plans to assess the impact; UMC did similar (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)
A profile of Faruk Fatih zer, the convicted CEO of defunct crypto exchange Thodex, as he starts a 11,196-year prison sentence in Turkey for laundering assets (Jenna Scatena/Wired)
A first look at two third-party iOS app stores in the EU, the B2B focused Mobivention and the upcoming AltStore, which take ~12 screen interactions to install (Callum Booth/The Verge)
Boosted by Taiwan's 2024 elections, Threads has revived its popularity in the country, where it's the most downloaded social app according to Sensor Tower (Zeyi Yang/MIT Technology Review)
An interview with Oren Etzioni, the former CEO of Allen Institute for AI, on his nonprofit TrueMedia.org, which offers free tools for identifying deepfakes (New York Times)
PitchBook and NVCA report: US VC investments in Q1 2024 hit $36.6B, lowest since 2017, across 2,882 deals, down YoY from $51.6B across 4,026 deals (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)
Newzoo: PC and console game revenues grew 2.6% YoY to $93.5B in 2023, but average quarterly playtime hours fell 26% from Q1 2021 through Q4 2023 (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)
PitchBook: VCs raised $30.4B globally in Q1 2024, a marked slowdown from 2023, which itself was the worst year since 2016, suggesting the end of "megafunds" era (George Hammond/Financial Times)
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+ (Granth Vanaik/Reuters)
The FCC plans to vote on April 25 to restore net neutrality rules and assume regulatory oversight of broadband internet that was rescinded under President Trump (David Shepardson/Reuters)
PE firm EQT AB agrees to acquire compliance software provider Avetta from Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, sources say at a ~$3B valuation, including debt (Ryan Gould/Bloomberg)
Modal, which offers employees personalized technical and AI skills training, raised a $25M Series A co-led by Left Lane Capital and Ensemble VC (Andrew Mendez/Silicon Valley ...)
George Carlin's estate settles with the makers of Dudesy, who agree to remove their YouTube video and podcast they originally claimed used an "AI" George Carlin (Christopher Kuo/New York Times)
Anthropic researchers detail "many-shot jailbreaking", which can evade LLMs' safety guardrails by including a large number of faux dialogues in a single prompt (Devin Coldewey/TechCrunch)
POTUS' official Threads account starts using Meta's ActivityPub integration to post on the decentralized networking protocol (Wes Davis/The Verge)
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 (Reed Albergotti/Semafor)
Google details Device Bound Session Credentials, a feature that aims to stop browser cookie theft and uses PCs' TPM chip, testing it in beta versions of Chrome (Michael Kan/PCMag)
Intel says its Foundry division had $18.9B in 2023 revenue, down 31% YoY, and a $7B operating loss, up from $5.2B, and expects 2024 to be the peak of its losses (Ian King/Bloomberg)
The US NIST, which analyzed only 199 of the 3,370 CVEs the agency received in March, blames the backlog on a lack of "interagency support" (Simon Hendery/SC Media)
The US Cyber Safety Review Board faults Microsoft for a "cascade of avoidable errors" that led to the 2023 Chinese hack of top US government officials' emails (Washington Post)
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 (research!rsc)
X promotes Kylie McRoberts to Head of Safety, after Ella Irwin left in June 2023, when Musk overruled a decision that limited the spread of an anti-trans video (David Ingram/NBC News)
Billie Eilish, Katy Perry, and 200+ others sign a letter to AI developers and tech companies decrying "predatory" AI that steals voices, replaces artists, more (Sara Fischer/Axios)
Read AI, which uses generative AI to summarize meetings, emails, and other messages, raised a $21M Series A led by Goodwater Capital (Michael Nuez/VentureBeat)
Luminance, which offers generative AI tools for lawyers, raised a $40M Series B led by March Capital and says 600 organizations in 70 countries use its tools (Lucy Adams/Tech.eu)
Apple debuts Spatial Personas in beta, letting up to five Vision Pro users participate together within compatible apps without being in the same physical space (Raymond Wong/Inverse)
As Amazon plans more grocery stores after an 18-month pause, it will use Dash Carts, where shoppers can scan items as they shop, instead of Just Walk Out tech (Theo Wayt/The Information)
Yahoo plans to acquire Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom's Artifact for an undisclosed sum; Yahoo is buying the news app's tech, not the team (David Pierce/The Verge)
Flip, a marketplace with product review videos by shoppers, raised a $144M Series C led by Streamlined at a $1.05B valuation, including $50M from AppLovin (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg)
Sources: Microsoft is testing a new AI-powered Xbox chatbot that can automate support tasks via an "embodied AI character", as part of larger Xbox AI efforts (Tom Warren/The Verge)
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 (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)
A profile of MIT labor economist David Autor, an unlikely AI optimist who says AI may help restore "the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the US labor market" (Steve Lohr/New York Times)
Sources: the US asks South Korea to add China chip export restrictions similar to Commerce Department rules, including on chips beyond 14nm and DRAM beyond 18nm (Bloomberg)
A profile of hiking app AllTrails, which exploded during the pandemic, has raised $225M+, and now focuses on helping users "find your outdoors", not just trails (Nikita Richardson/New York Times)
An interview with outgoing ASML CTO Martin van den Brink on the company's rise, Moore's Law, competition from Chinese companies, hyper-NA technology, and more (MIT Technology Review)
An interview with Sony Music CEO Rob Stringer on AI's role in the industry, licensing concerns with TikTok, working with Sony for over two decades, and more (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)
On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart says Apple asked him not to have FTC chair Lina Khan for his Apple podcast by saying "please don't talk to her" (Sara Fischer/Axios)
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 (Nilay Patel/The Verge)
NYC-based Web3 infrastructure company Xion raised $25M, reportedly a Series A, from Animoca Brands, Laser Digital, Multicoin, Arrington Capital, and others (MK Manoylov/The Block)
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 (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
Japan approves up to $3.9B in subsidies to chip venture Rapidus, as the company tries to close the gap with TSMC in cutting-edge fabrication technology (Yuki Hagiwara/Bloomberg)
The US and UK sign an agreement on how to test and assess risks from emerging AI models, marking the first bilateral arrangement on AI safety in the world (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)
Trump Media & Technology Group closed down 21% on April 1, wiping out the gains from last week, after it disclosed a $58M+ loss on $4.1M in revenue in 2023 (Reuters)
Sources: Tiger raised ~$2.2B for its latest fund, well short of the $6B target and its smallest fundraising haul in about a decade, after raising a $12.7B fund (Hema Parmar/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 (Bloomberg)
Telegram now lets Premium users turn their account into a business account, with options like a custom start page, greeting and away messages, and chatbots (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
Canadian payments company Nuvei has agreed to be purchased and taken private by PE firm Advent International in a $6.3B deal (Josh Scott/BetaKit)
Apple researchers detail an AI system that can resolve references to elements displayed on a screen, in some cases better than GPT-4 can when given screenshots (Michael Nuez/VentureBeat)
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 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
To highlight an attack vector, a researcher made a package with a name hallucinated by ChatGPT; it had 30K+ downloads in three months and appeared in many repos (Lasso Security)
Binance names its first board of directors, which has seven members including CEO Richard Teng and three other Binance execs (Muyao Shen/Bloomberg)
OpenAI no longer requires an account to use ChatGPT, but with "slightly more restrictive content policies", starting in a few markets and rolling out globally (Devin Coldewey/TechCrunch)
AI search engine Perplexity, which touts on its site that search should be "free from the influence of advertising-driven models", says it will sell ads (Trishla Ostwal/Adweek)
Filing: to settle a 2020 class action suit about Chrome's Incognito mode, Google has agreed to destroy billions of data points it allegedly improperly collected (Wall Street Journal)
Filing: Sam Altman no longer controls the OpenAI Startup Fund, which has a $325M+ gross asset value; Ian Hathaway, who has helped manage the fund, is in charge (Dan Primack/Axios)
A profile of Matt Farley, who has released thousands of songs under various pseudonyms on streaming services with the goal of matching nearly any search query (Brett Martin/New York Times)
Filing: Donald Trump's Truth Social lost $58M+ on $4.1M in revenue during 2023; Trump Media & Technology Group is valued at $7B+ after going public on March 26 (Dan Primack/Axios)
Interviews and Telegram messages detail how Russian middlemen used Tether to avoid US sanctions and procure parts for drones and other high-tech equipment (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 (Deepa Seetharaman/Wall Street Journal)
Microsoft plans to unbundle Teams from Office 365 globally starting April 1 amid antitrust scrutiny, after a similar unbundling in EU in August 2023 (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
Some teens say a Snapchat+ feature that lets users see their position in their friends' digital orbits, rendered as a solar system, is adding to their anxieties (Julie Jargon/Wall Street Journal)
SK Hynix tops $100B in valuation as its stock rose 2x+ over the past year amid high-bandwidth memory demand; analysts: SK Hynix has 90%+ share of the latest HBM (Youkyung Lee/Bloomberg)
A look at the autonomous truck industry's challenges, including a lack of federal regulation, as Aurora and Kodiak plan a major expansion in Texas this year (Trisha Thadani/Washington Post)
Ampere: seven movie adaptations of video games were released broadly in 2023; Comscore: movies based on video games grossed $712.2M at the US box office in 2023 (Wall Street Journal)
Sources: Apple suggests podcasters join its subscription program to be on its Podcast "browse" carousel; 5 of the first 7 podcasts last week were participants (Max Tani/Semafor)
Dan Lynch, founder of Interop, a computer networking equipment exhibition that helped accelerate TCP/IP adoption and internet commercialization, dies at age 82 (Katie Hafner/New York Times)
A profile of YC's Garry Tan, whose combative online persona has sparked controversies as he tries to shift SF politics from idealistic progressivism to centrism (Heather Knight/New York Times)
Demis Hassabis says the AI hype caused by a surge of money is clouding research; CB Insights: VCs invested $42.5B in 2,500 AI startup equity rounds in 2023 (John Thornhill/Financial Times)
Dapo Abioduns outpouring of post-subsidy interventions - The Cable
Insecurity: Lagbajas clear vision yielding positive results - The Cable
The Naira abuse palaver - The Cable
