Adobe abandons $20 billion acquisition of Figma (www.theverge.com)
Under pressure from regulators, Adobe calls off its plans to acquire a leading competitor....
NASA’s GUSTO balloon telescope will map part of the Milky Way (www.theverge.com)
The first to be funded as part of the Explorers Program, GUSTO will spend at least 55 days floating above Antarctica.
2023 was the year the economics of tech caught up with reality (www.engadget.com)
We're about to see what happens when an industry built on failed bets suddenly has to pay back its debts.
Flipboard is pivoting to ActivityPub and the fediverse (www.theverge.com)
Another walled garden is opening up to the new social web.
Fighting viruses with viruses? ‘Gene drive’ offers new strategy to beat infections (www.science.org)
If your immune system or drugs can’t stop a viral infection, why not pit a virus against itself? That’s the provocative idea several labs are pursuing. They are studying whether deliberately introducing engineered viruses into people infected with their natural relatives can “drive” a foreign gene into those viruses that...
Microsoft’s AI Chatbot Replies to Election Questions With Conspiracies, Fake Scandals, and Lies (www.wired.com)
Research shared exclusively with WIRED shows that Copilot, Microsoft’s AI chatbot, often responds to questions about elections with lies and conspiracy theories.
Ilya Sutskever’s Team at OpenAI Built Tools to Control a Superhuman AI (gizmodo.com)
OpenAI Chief Scientist’s status remains unclear, but his “Superalignment” team put out a groundbreaking paper on the path to AGI.
Apple is testing a feature to help App Store developers undercut competitors’ subscription prices (www.engadget.com)
Apple has begun piloting an App Store feature called contingent pricing that will let developers offer cheaper subscriptions to customers based on the other subscriptions they already hold. The company says it's meant to help developers "attract and retain subscribers."
OC What are some essential browser extensions for "quieting down" the internet? (www.staygrounded.online)
Free for an unlimited time only!
African Scientist aims to eradicate malaria by editing mosquito DNA | CNN (edition.cnn.com)
Burkina Faso scientist Abdoulaye Diabate is developing an innovative technique that could potentially wipe out malaria-transmitting mosquito species by altering their genes.
Marketing Company Claims That It Actually Is Listening to Your Phone and Smart Speakers to Target Ads (www.404media.co)
A marketing team within media giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims it has the capability to listen to ambient conversations of consumers through embedded microphones in smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices to gather data and use it to target ads, according to a review of CMG marketing materials by 404 Media and details from a...
Ubiquiti blunder let some customers watch others' feeds (www.theregister.com)
Cloud misconfig blamed and now fixed
TikTok requires users to “forever waive” rights to sue over past harms (arstechnica.com)
TikTok may be seeking to avoid increasingly high costs of mass arbitration.
Zuckerberg says Threads will dip its toe in the 'fediverse' as it opens to Europe (www.nbcnews.com)
Threads will use ActivityPub, the same technology that other networks such as Mastodon have embraced as a way to make social media more open.
Quest owners can use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in VR, but do you really want to? (www.theverge.com)
Three of Microsoft’s Office apps are now available on Meta’s Quest headsets, and while they aren’t optimized for VR, they work in a pinch.
Google will update Maps to prevent authorities from accessing location history data (www.theverge.com)
Google’s latest update to Maps protects users’ locations from law enforcement.
Google Will Turn Off Cookies for 30 Million People on January 4 (gizmodo.com)
Google’s cookie-killing “Privacy Sandbox” project is finally set to begin.
Amazon’s Internet Satellites Will Use Space Lasers to Transmit Data (www.bloomberg.com)
Amazon.com Inc., which launched its first internet satellites in October, says it will use space lasers to ensure reliable broadband coverage even in the middle of the ocean....
Google Wrapped 2023 | Everything Toxic Google Did in the last 12 months. (youtube.com)
A lot can happen in a year when you're the worlds largest search engine.
Google's and Apple's walled gardens will survive Epic’s court win (www.livemint.com)
A US court ruling against Google’s app store policies has shaken the layout of these gardens a bit, but they’ll stay in place—for now....
U.S. and China race to shield secrets from quantum computers (www.reuters.com)
Quantum computing could shred the encryption that guards digital information. Great powers are sprinting to master this technology to crack their adversaries’ codes.
Intel’s Core Ultra CPUs are here — and they all come with silicon dedicated to AI (www.theverge.com)
Intel has finally revealed the details on the Core Ultra 9.
Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them (www.404media.co)
In one of the coolest and more outrageous repair stories in quite some time, three white-hat hackers helped a regional rail company in southwest Poland unbrick a train that had been artificially rendered inoperable by the train’s manufacturer after an independent maintenance company worked on it. The train’s manufacturer is...
Threads launches for nearly half a billion more users in Europe (www.theverge.com)
Months after its launch in over 100 other countries.
YouTube Is Now Hiding Which Channels Get a Cut of Ad Revenue (www.wired.com)
YouTube removed a snippet of code that publicly disclosed whether a channel receives ad and subscription payouts, obscuring which creators benefit most from the platform.
